Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel - Hardcover

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John Stubbs was born in 1977 and studied English at Oxford and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge where he completed a doctorate in 2005. Donne: The Reformed Soul was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Reprobates was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

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`One of the best literary biographies I have ever read' -- Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph on 'Donne: The Reformed Soul'

`Highly readable, dashing as well as detailed' -- Andrew Motion, Guardian on 'Donne: The Reformed Soul'

'Marvellously incisive, learned and moving. There is plenty of substance in Stubbs book - and plenty of wit, too' -Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times on
Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

Aus dem Klappentext

'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through'

Born in Ireland in 1667, Jonathan Swift defiantly clung tohis Englishness. He refused to relinquish this attachment even as corruption and injustice gradually led him to turn against the English government. In a long life, Swift proved a reluctant rebel, though one with a relish for the fight, and implacable when provoked - a voice of withering disenchantment unrivalled in English. But he was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, a conscientious Anglican minister, as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satire of the English language - Gulliver's Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparallelled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists.

John Stubbs' biography sets out to capture the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakeable attachment to an unmarried woman, his 'Stella'; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all of the answers.