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Stephen Karian. Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2010. Pp. x + 274 pp. $85.
Mr. Karian's monograph is a welcome companion to Cambridge University Press's new edition of Swift's works. His blunt basic premise is that "our understanding of Swift as an author is incomplete without attending to both print publication and manuscript circulation as well as to their complex intersection." His meticulous reconstruction of Swift's involvement with both his printers and contemporary manuscript readers successfully makes a compelling case for the importance of manuscript studies as part of Swift scholarship and the history of reading practices.
The book is divided into two sections. The opening one looks first at the stages of his print publication career and then more specifically at his early involvement with manuscript circulation. The second part looks in depth at the handwritten and print circulation of three of Swift's poems, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody," "The Legion Club," and "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," suggesting the ways in which the presence of manuscript copies in circulation simultaneously with the print ones complicate both an editor's and a literary critic's jobs. Mr. Karian is candid about the limitations of attempting to reconstruct Swift's manuscript circulation, as Swift apparently never used a professional scribe, and thus many of the surviving handwritten copies exist in undated versions, done by unknown hands: "any discussion about the manuscript circulation of Swift's writings will be, in certain respects, conjectural and far less thorough than an examination of print publication." Yet enough examples permit him to argue that while Swift's writings initially had very limited circulation in manuscript, as his...