LIFE:

Swift is considered the greatest English writer of his time and one of the largest satirist ever existed.
He was son of an English family settled in Ireland and during his childhood he studied in Kilkenny (Kilkenny School) and then in Dublin (Trinity College). After going to England on his mother's advice, he meets, in the house of Sir William Temple, Esther Johnson (Stella), to which he will be forever connected. After having taken religious orders he becomes parish priest of Kilroot, but living mostly in London where he participates to the most important political circles. He becomes councilman of the Tory government supporting it with pamphlets and articles.
With the fall of the government Swift returns in Ireland having obtained the role of dean of the Church of St. Patrick in Dublin. In this period of stay in the island exposes the oppressions to which the Irish people (even if he despises them) are subject by English and local government. After the death of beloved his mental disturb worsens more and more until his death.

SUGGESTED WORKS:

Gulliver's Travels, 1726 It's his most famous book. Written as an adventure novel it is actually a cruel satire of human race, civilisation and Anglo-Irish (his fellow countrymen are the wild Yahoo). Lemuel Gulliver, doctor on a merchant ship, is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where everything, beginning by the inhabitants, is large a fifteenth of persons and objects we know. In the second part instead Gulliver visits Brobdingnag, where the ratio is turned upside down and where the doctor becomes the of the King's daughter, who keeps him between her playthings. In the third part Gulliver visits Laputa and the continent that has Lagado as capital, where the satire is addressed against philosophers, historians and inventors. In the island of Glubdubdrib, then, Gulliver evokes the shadows of the great man of the antiquity and from their answers he discovers their bad habits and meanness; while among the immortal Struldbrug, he notices that the largest sadness for the man would be the perspective of not giving an end to the tedium vitae. In the fourth part then, the virtuous easiness of the Houyhnhnm horses contrasts with the nauseous brutality of the Yahoo, beasts with a human aspect.

Drapier's Letters, 1724 and A Modest Proposal, 1729 Authentic masterpieces of irony and rhetoric, these pamphlet were written in defence of Irish people who considered Swift a national hero.  In the first one he rails against the English hailing openly to independence of Ireland. In the second Swift proposes to the Irishes, as the only way to survive, the use of cannibalism. (All the political background's pamphlet written in Ireland are collected in the book Irish Tracts).

ALTRE OPERE:

An Account of Battle Between the Ancient and Modern Books, 1704
Pamphlet where it lives again, in a kind of Homeric farce, the controversy between modern and antique, new science and humanistic tradition.

A discours Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 1704
The Target of this essay are the mystical states, reduced to pathological manifestations (Every shape of inspiration is, at the origin, of sexual nature).

A Tale of a Tub, 1704
A ferocious and acute satire of the Christianity, both catholic and anglican. This written keeps Swift from having a shining ecclesiastical career in England.

Numerous political, religious and moral pamphlet written between 1701 and 1714; Are worthy of mention Predictions For The Year 1708, 1708, Argument against abolishing Christianity, 1711 and Project for the Advancement of religion, 1709, these last two written in order to try to recover his reputation among the Clergy. In these years when he writes Journal to Stella - a series of letters written to his friend where is it possible to find a vivid description of the London life, described with an unusual infantile and light language - he collaborates with the London newspapers "Tatler" and "Examiner" for which he writes many articles.

The conduct of the Allies, 1711
A political pamphlet, to support the Tory administration, that prepared the public opinion for peace with France.

A Character, Panegyrick, and Description of the Legion Club, 1737
Cruel invective against the puppet Dublin's government.

A Treatise On Polite Conversation, 1738 and Proposal for correcting the English Tongue, 1712 and others pamphlets and essays on the uses of the language, with particular attention to the connection between language and gestural expressiveness, language and social classes, use of slang.

Poems
Remarkable was the Irish influence especially in descriptions of popular festivities and in the invectives. Parodistic poems and deformations of other texts. Scatological poems like The Lady's dressing room, 1732)

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