Book Review: "Swift's Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy"
Cara Burke
Issue date: 11/19/09 Section: Arts
Call somebody a soft white curd of ass's milk - go ahead, do it - then try to tell me the 18th century is boring. "Swift's Travels", a collection of essays on Jonathan Swift's satire, reminds me of his modern descendants: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "The Life of Brian," "Faulty Towers." Monty Python's pair of democratic peasants, pawing through piles of manure and crying out against their fictional oppressors, recall Swift's old scientist, assigned the "Project for Reducing Excrement to Its Original Food," who carefully sifts through a barrel of human waste a week.
A Tory and a high-church Anglican priest, Jonathan Swift wrote satire in both prose and poetry. The hilarity of "Gulliver's Travels" and the venom of "A Modest Proposal" draw fewer readers than they once did, but books like "Swift's Travels" may portend a modern Swiftian revival.
"Swift's Travels" is a hybrid of scholarship and pleasant - if a touch scandalous - literary dabbling. The lighter essays gently introduce readers to the satirical climate of Swift's time; the more scholarly ones furnish students of English satire with insights into the lives, relationships and interests of their favorite authors. David Rosen begins by tracing the development of satire from Renaissance allegory and explaining its role in British culture. James McLaverty writes on the friendship Swift shared with Alexander Pope, before they were separated by the death of Queen Anne. Peter Sabor reveals subtle Swiftian elements in Jane Austen's novels and Harold Love discusses the watering-places and hot springs where Augustan women would vacation for "health" and other amusements.
This book leads readers away from conceptions of Swift as a misanthrope - a monster who encouraged the eating of babies, who would murder Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and all other sects outside the Anglican Church. But the vivid and unflattering pictures of adultery and smut at Bath, Ballyspellan, and Tunbridge Wells leave no room to call him immoderate. The essay "Killing Noe Murder" introduces readers to a whole genre of rollicking polemical fun, and exonerates him from cannibalism and curmudgeonliness. Far from the cynic of modern imagination, Swift emerges from the book a good-natured admonisher of his wildly perverse audience.
Some of the contributors to "Swift's Travels," however, succumb to the common failures of academic prose: inscrutable jargon, obscurity, and bad phrasing. So to the pressed-for-time reader here is a sly hint: read essays 1,3,4,7,10,13, and 14. You will be repaid with a barrel of laughs, rather than excrement.
"Swift's Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy," edited by Nicholas Hudson and Aaron Santesso, Cambridge University Press, $99, 320 pages.
A Tory and a high-church Anglican priest, Jonathan Swift wrote satire in both prose and poetry. The hilarity of "Gulliver's Travels" and the venom of "A Modest Proposal" draw fewer readers than they once did, but books like "Swift's Travels" may portend a modern Swiftian revival.
"Swift's Travels" is a hybrid of scholarship and pleasant - if a touch scandalous - literary dabbling. The lighter essays gently introduce readers to the satirical climate of Swift's time; the more scholarly ones furnish students of English satire with insights into the lives, relationships and interests of their favorite authors. David Rosen begins by tracing the development of satire from Renaissance allegory and explaining its role in British culture. James McLaverty writes on the friendship Swift shared with Alexander Pope, before they were separated by the death of Queen Anne. Peter Sabor reveals subtle Swiftian elements in Jane Austen's novels and Harold Love discusses the watering-places and hot springs where Augustan women would vacation for "health" and other amusements.
This book leads readers away from conceptions of Swift as a misanthrope - a monster who encouraged the eating of babies, who would murder Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and all other sects outside the Anglican Church. But the vivid and unflattering pictures of adultery and smut at Bath, Ballyspellan, and Tunbridge Wells leave no room to call him immoderate. The essay "Killing Noe Murder" introduces readers to a whole genre of rollicking polemical fun, and exonerates him from cannibalism and curmudgeonliness. Far from the cynic of modern imagination, Swift emerges from the book a good-natured admonisher of his wildly perverse audience.
Some of the contributors to "Swift's Travels," however, succumb to the common failures of academic prose: inscrutable jargon, obscurity, and bad phrasing. So to the pressed-for-time reader here is a sly hint: read essays 1,3,4,7,10,13, and 14. You will be repaid with a barrel of laughs, rather than excrement.
"Swift's Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy," edited by Nicholas Hudson and Aaron Santesso, Cambridge University Press, $99, 320 pages.
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