Jean Paul Forster Book order

In this study, the author shows that, under the influence of the popular geography of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of literary works began to make use of actual topographical data. Two of these works even make use of maps. He demonstrates that the kinship between geographical and literary representations of topography went further: they underwent parallel developments. His analyses of the different types of geographical representations of space that appeared in the course of the century allow him to explore the worldviews they embody, the new and often conflicting attitudes to space that they reveal, and the connections these representations have with the evolution of the contemporary notions of motion and mobility. The author underlines the role these topographical representations played in the nascent realism of the novel and the new life they breathed into poetry. His study is also a contribution to the discussion of the important changes that occurred in the way people thought about and lived space, many of which announce our time.

Much has been written on Swift and his principal satires. But one aspect of his art has received surprisingly little attention, namely his satirical deployment of fictions, which more than anything else endeared him to early readers. The critical implications of this fact are the subject of Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist . Against the current tendency to stress the relationship between the work and the life of the man or his age, J.-P. Forster explores how the great Augustan satirist uses various simple fictional devices to produce effects which lend his satires a subtlety that irony and rhetoric could never achieve by themselves. He argues that it is these fictional devices that have allowed his satires to survive the test of time. A close examination of the well-known and not so well-known satires demonstrates that Swift's constant concern with the relationship of text to reader played a crucial role in his choice and handling of fiction. It also suggests that his conception of imagination, more important to an understanding of his work than generally assumed, is as problematic as his conception of reason.