gullivers travel :: essays research papers

I want to outline in this essay both(prenominal) of the ways in which actives texts - in particular the shorter prose works and the poetry concerned with the female body - take up and make explicit contradictory philosophical adjusts. Much time and critical effort has been spent attempting to trace some unifying philosophical thread through the maze created by these and other of brisks writings, when much(prenominal) a thread may be elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.1 It seems possible that genius cause of this critical need to establish consistency in Swift is the influence of Postmodernist thought, which tends to cause a conditioned response to eighteenth century literary works in which the instinctive move is to look for that which totalizes, compartmentalizes, reveals a master narrative or supplies a clearly defined linear teleology. If, however, this kind of pre-imagined consistency proves unavailable, the critic is left with the notion of a multi-vocal, polych romatic Swift which should not, perhaps, be so surprising as there seems nothing alien to the intellectual trends of early-eighteenth century England in Swifts assumption of positions that appear radically opposed to one another. Periods of transition necessarily involve the existence of contradictory positions in constellation often within the work of a single writer or thinker. sluice Sir Isaac Newton, the grea block out of all icons of Enlightenment rationality, can be represented in such a way "Newton was a Janus figure, emblematic of the new, rationalist, scientific and layman future, yet also using his mathematical skills for abstruse astrological and biblical calculations." (Corfield, 11). Clearly any attempt to attribute a definitive philosophical position to Swift is fraught with difficulty.2 Not only must the reader attempt to penetrate multiple levels of irony at a micro-level, but at a macro-level the fact that Swift was an Anglican clergyman complicates any phi losophical interpretation. The origins of the debates on this issue are contemporaneous with the publication of the texts themselves (William Wottons observations, for example), and criticism up to the end of the nineteenth century continued, predominately, to insist on an irreligious Swift an approach that survived into the twentieth century "no defence of Swifts fundamental religious orthodoxy can stand the test of such writings. He is a sceptical humanist who again and again tilts at Christian belief". (Wilson Knight, on "The Tale of a Tub",124). This assay of criticism has been long overtaken, however, by