Essay help needed with Jonathan Swift textual essay

by Brandon
(Florida)

I have decided to write an essay on Jonathan Swift. I am a second year student at a university for an English II class. The paper has to cover Swift in one or more of his pieces and why he chose to write them in the format that he did. The professor has been consistantly vauge on the requirements so my questions are two fold.

One: Can anyone recomend any websites or books on Swifts works, I am specificly focusing on 'A Modest Proposal' and possibly 'Guliver's Travels' if I can't find enough to write on the first. The main topic that I need to focus on is question two.

Two: The professor says that the paper is on the textual aspect of the works we choose. As defined by her why they chose to write things a certain way. Can anyone clarify?

One example given is focusing on why author A wrote poem A as a poem instead of a short story/essay/novel/ect. To help me better understand the topic, would covering why Author A chose certain themes or what influenced them to do include them also count toward textual?

Well, it's a bit confusing to me. I hope someone else can make better sense.

Linda responds

This essay help question was a challenge for me, too, Brandon. I was not familiar with the term textual essay (I didn’t major in English), but when I looked it up, I found I did know the concept.

A textual essay is probably more what you and I would think of as a history paper than a literature paper. The kinds of influences on a writer that are appropriate for textual essays are not the kinds of personal experiences you and I usually think of as influcing writing. The textual essay wouldn’t discuss the fact that the author was regularly beaten by his father, for example. It would look at something like the influence of one written document on another.

Let me give you an example of the kind of problem that might become the basis of a textual essay. Suppose an author who handwrote her mansucript wrote something that looked to the printer like horseflesh. After the book is printed and becomes a classic, a scholar goes back to the original handwritten draft and discovers the word that was printed as horseflesh was actually horsefeathers. The scholar turns that discovery into a textual essay that explains how the mistake happpened, all the editions in which it appeared, and how the correct wording was discovered.

I recently read the Penguin edition of Ellen Glasgow’s novel Cranford edited by Patricia Ingham. Glasgow originally wrote her novel in installments for a magazine Charles Dickens published. In her introduction, Ingham discusses such things as changes made to the draft before it went into the magazine, and changes between the magazine publication and first edition of the novel in book form. She also discusses differences between Glasgow’s views of women and views expressed in print by her contemporaries. Those are the kinds of topics that are appropriate for a textual essay.

On its website, the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association of America presents what is essentially a list of what a textual essay includes. (I’m quoting here, but putting the committee’s information in list form for you.):

• sets forth the history of the text and its physical forms,
• describes or reports the authoritative or significant texts,
• explains how the text of the edition has been constructed or represented,
• gives the rationale for all decisions affecting its construction or representation, and
• discusses the verbal composition of the text as well as its punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

I’d guess that any instructor who assigned a textual essay to English II students won’t be happy with information from websites, but you might use them to get an idea of a topic to discuss in your paper. For example, you might find something about memoirs by sea captains that could have influenced Guillver’s Travels or some newspaper items about actual proposals for dealing with the “Irish problem” that Swift might have read.

Once you have an idea for your paper, I suggest you visit your college’s reference librarian. He/she can point you to the best resources for your needs and save you hours of time.

One more thing: Swift’s first name is spelled Jonathan with just the one H. I fixed your error here, but you'll need to watch for it in your paper.

Good luck, Brandon.