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On 28 October 1726 Gulliver’s Travels debuted on the literary scene as a political and philosophical satire meant to provoke and entertain an audience of relatively educated and wealthy British readers. Since then, Swift’s work has gradually evolved, assuming multiple forms and meanings while becoming accessible and attractive to an increasingly broad readership in and outside Britain. My study emphasises that reworkings, including re-editions, translations, abridgments, adaptations and illustrations, have played a primary role in this process. Its principal aim is to investigate how reworkings contributed to the popularity of Gulliver’s Travels by examining the dynamics and the stages through which they transformed its text and its original significance. Central to my research is the assumption that this transformation is largely the result of shifts of a translational nature and that, therefore, the analysis of reworkings and the understanding of their role can greatly benefit from the models of translation description devised in Descriptive Translation Studies. The reading of reworkings as entailing processes of translation shows how derivative creations operate collaboratively to ensure literary works’ continuous visibility and actively shape the literary polysystem. The study opens with an exploration of existing approaches to reworkings followed by an examination of the characteristics which exposed Gulliver’s Travels to continuous rethinking and reworking. Emphasis is put on how the work’s satirical significance gave rise to a complex early textual problem for which Gulliver’s Travels can be said to have debuted on the literary scene as a derivative production in the first place. The largest part of the study is devoted to textual analysis. This is carried out in two stages. First I concentrate on reworkings of Gulliver’s Travels published in eighteenth- and in nineteenth-century Italy. These illustrate how interlingual translation operated alongside criticism, abridgment, adaptation and pictorial representation to extend the accessibility of Swift’s work and eventually turned it into a popular and children’s book. Then, I examine British reworkings and how the translational processes which they entail contributed to the popularity and the popularisation of Gulliver’s Travels in eighteenth-century Britain.

This is a study of Daniel Defoe's political rhetoric and polemical strategies between the years 1697 and 1717. It explores and analyses a representative selection of what may be termed Defoe's `public voices'. In its broadest definition, these public voices are understood to be the opinions expressed and the rhetorical stances taken by Defoe in those pieces of his writing which directly or indirectly relate to the sphere of official, governmental and national discourse and activity. In the most basic sense, this thesis attempts to highlight and explain the way in which the language, imagery and concerns of Defoe's publications were shaped by the events and attitudes of the historical moment at which they were produced. In the process, this study re-situates, and thus necessarily re-evaluates, the voices and apparent meanings of some of Defoe's better known texts, while offering extensive investigations of the rhetorical strategies of publications which have previously been neglected by Defoe scholars. In the context of the above, an attempt is made to demonstrate that the poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) was not only a response to xenophobic sentiments prevalent in English society at the turn of the century but did, in fact, represent Defoe's final, summative contribution to the standing army controversy of the late 1690s. On a similar note, this thesis aims to show that the verse satire Jure Divino (1706) was the culmination of Defoe's involvement in the occasional conformity controversy of the early 1700s and constituted on important element of his campaign in favour of religious toleration. In addition, I argue that volume one of The Family Instructor (1715) was Defoe's response to the Jacobite-inspired unrest of the years 1714-15 and, as such, represented an important political act. Finally, this study offers an extensive investigation of one of Defoe's most problematic publications, An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and Tnobling Foreigners, Is a Treasonable Conspiracy (1717). The pamphlet, I suggest, represented a highly ironic attack on one of Defoe's old adversaries, John Toland, and only develops its full rhetorical force if read in the context of the standing army controversy.

This study is intended as a dialogue between literature and theology, utilizing selected works of the playwright and novelist, Henry Fielding (1707-54). While historical studies of Fielding have clearly yielded much of importance, a broader and less deterministic assessment concerning the latent ambivalences of this, one of the earliest novelists, has yet to be explored. Such an assessment has implications for the current relationship between, and the separate study of, literature and theology. The methodology is informed by an awareness of human frailty (what Fielding described as HUMAN NATURE) and centres upon the use of a specific interpretative tool that I call misplacement. By this, I mean the continuous parting with the ineffable – the perpetual recognition that, in writing, there is always a sense of the other, be that an alternative path not taken, the nagging sense of the numinous, or the coming to terms with the ludicrous nature of the human condition. Such fragile, comedic alterity provides a weak metaphysical root which is shared by both literature and theology. To illustrate the effects of such misplacement, this thesis sets the novels of Henry Fielding alongside works of contemporary philosophical theology such as the post onto-theological critique of Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo, as well as alongside postmodern works of fiction, such as those of Vonnegut and Calvino. In so doing, common critical zones such as epistemology, ethics, mimesis, canonicity, and revelation are investigated. The result of this analysis is that, in all these areas, the novel form, in Fielding’s hands, displays a powerful comic resonance with a theology which seeks to move beyond a strictly deterministic approach. Thus, we discover that Fielding’s work, rather than simply being expressive of proto-Enlightenment principles, actually subverts those assumed securities regarding the status of the individual and his place in the world, before God. In its conclusion, this study reveals the challenge of recognising the inescapably theological nature of the novel and that theology itself, is fictive. This assessment points to a greater need for further shared exploration of the relationship between theology and literature - to their mutual benefit.

Bibliography: leaves 333-361 / xv, 361 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1988