NEWPORT - Reading Circle
Date: Tue 14 Mar 2006 , 07:00 PM — 08:30 PM
Duration: 1 hrs 30 mins
Reading Circle
@
Newport Public Library
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Reading this Month: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Newport Public Library's Reading circle meets on the 2nd Tuesday of each month from noon to 1:30 p.m. Come join us in the McEntee Meeting Room -- and bring a lunch. Go to http://www.newportlibrary.org/circle.htm for more information.
More about Jonathan Swift:
1. Irish author and journalist, dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Dublin) from 1713, the foremost prose satirist in English language. Swift became insane in his last years, but until his death he was known as Dublin's foremost citizen. Among Swift's best known works is Gulliver's Travels (1726), where the stories of Gulliver's experiences among dwarfs and giants are best known. Swift gave to these journeys an air of authenticity and realism and many contemporary readers believed them to be true. From Books and Writers
2. Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Protestant Anglo-Irish parents: his ancestors had been Royalists, and all his life he would be a High-Churchman. His father, also Jonathan, died a few months before he was born, upon which his mother, Abigail, returned to England, leaving her son behind, in the care of relatives. In 1673, at the age of six, Swift began his education at Kilkenny Grammar School, which was, at the time, the best in Ireland. Between 1682 and 1686 he attended, and graduated from, Trinity College in Dublin, though he was not, apparently, an exemplary student. By David Cody at The Victorian Web
3. Famous Irish poet, pamphleteer, satirist and wit of Augustan Age. He was educated (more or less) at Trinity College, Dublin. In the aftermath of the 1689 Jacobite rebellion in Ireland, Swift found shelter in England, under the auspices of Sir William Temple, a prominent diplomat and statesman. Swift served as secretary to Temple for the next ten years. In the process, he earned his M.A. at Oxford, was ordained into the Episcopalian Church of Ireland and was charged with the tutorship of Temple's young ward, Esther Johnson, a.k.a. "Stella". From the History of Economic Thought website
More about Gulliver's Travels:
1. Gulliver’s Travels is about a specific set of political conflicts, but if it were nothing more than that it would long ago have been forgotten. The staying power of the work comes from its depiction of the human condition and its often despairing, but occasionally hopeful, sketch of the possibilities for humanity to rein in its baser instincts. From SparkNotes
2. In this lecture I wish to focus on two different things by way of an introduction to Gulliver's Travels at the end of our first two semesters of Liberal Studies. Firstly, I would like to offer something of a quick summary and synthesis of two or three of the major issues we have considered in the past year by way of highlighting the importance of the seventeenth-century literature we have been dealing with lately. Lecture by Ian Johnston
3. 1726) A satire by Jonathan Swift. Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman, travels to exotic lands, including Lilliput (where the people are six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where the people are seventy feet tall), and the land of the Houyhnhnms (where horses are the intelligent beings, and humans, called Yahoos, are mute brutes of labor). From Answers.com