Literature Network » Jonathan Swift

Claude Rawson. God, Gulliver, and Genocide. Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945.(Book Review)

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From: Utopian Studies
Date: 20020322
Author:Beecher, Jonathan

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xvii + 401 pp. $35.00.

JONATHAN SWIFT is a writer often admired by readers who do not share his conservative and authoritarian political views. This admiration is generally premised on a liberal reading of a number of celebrated texts. The Modest Proposal is seen as a condemnation of the mentality of callous "projectors" such as the author. Lemuel Gulliver's occasional tirades against imperial conquest are seen as constituting an unequivocal rejection of the whole imperial project. And the account of Houyhnhnm-land in Part 4 of Gulliver's ...

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