Jonathan Swift's Poems: A New Scholarly Edition and Online Archive

FAIN: RQ-50627-12

Lafayette College (Easton, PA 18042-7625)
James Woolley (Project Director: December 2011 to March 2022)

The preparation for print and online editions of the complete poems of the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), and of a digital archive of ancillary works. (36 months)

We propose to complete a four-volume edition of Jonathan Swift's poems and to mount the first stage of a complementary online archive. Not since 1937 have Swift's poems received full scholarly editing. That edition gives a misleading, incomplete idea of what Swift wrote, and its annotations are entirely inadequate. Our edition will accurately present all of Swift's poems, excluding spurious accretions while adding recently discovered authentic pieces. Our digital archive will present fully searchable and downloadable texts of all poems in the printed edition as well as ancillary poems that the printed edition cannot accommodate. Our edition will be the first to take account of every known eighteenth-century printed and manuscript text of every poem. Swift's poems, in addition to their literary interest, are primary sources for scholars working on eighteenth-century British or Irish economics, politics, history, and religion.