Jonathan Swift : the Irish identity / Robert Mahony.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-215) and index.

1. Swift and George Faulkner: Cultivating Irish Memory -- 2. The Early Biographers: Preserving Mixed Impressions -- 3. British Canonization and Irish Diffidence, 1755-1800 -- 4. A Protestant 'Liberator', 1800-1840 -- 5. A Nationalist Ancestor, 1840-1870 -- 6. Nationalism and Historicism: Confirmation and Resistance, 1870-1930 -- 7. From Patriot to Personality, 1930-1995.

This book traces Swift's fluctuating reception in Ireland through the centuries, finding in Swift's ambivalence about his homeland - which he could not love even as he defended its cause - echoes and anticipations of the ambiguities that have marked the development of Irish identity at large. Mahony looks at Swift's posthumous reputation in literary culture and examines his unusual place in Irish political rhetoric. He shows that Swift's patriotic reputation suffered in the later eighteenth century through its seeming irrelevance to shifting political circumstances.