Swift and Pope : satirists in dialogue /

Griffin (emer., NYU) offers five lengthy essays, each focusing on a particular period of dialogue between Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744), starting in 1710 ("The Four Last Years of Queen Anne") and continuing until Pope's death. The book as a whole examines the effect that this lifelong dialogue had on each satirist. Whereas earlier studies explored either the writers' shared sensibility or their divergences, Griffin looks at how, as "satirists in dialogue" with one another, they defined their self-perception, and he argues that "to read them in isolation is in part to misread them." He explores crucial areas of conversation and correspondence along with obvious poems-as-response and collaborative authorship and editorship; he also makes brief forays into other subjects, for example, book history. Griffin draws loosely on theories of dialogic writing without much explicit theorizing. He also mentions various critical consensuses and trends, but though he does this with general accuracy he does not substantiate and document these claims in footnotes or bibliography--a significant weakness of the book. Nevertheless, by exploring the tendency of 18th-century texts to have multiple, even anonymous authors and to inhabit explicitly responsive contexts, Griffin offers crucial pre-Romantic contexts for both authors. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. S. Vilmar Salisbury University