From Standpoint Magazine:
What is the greatest and most universally loved book ever written in Ireland — wilder than Wilde, more shocking than Shaw, more experimental than Joyce, more disillusioned than Beckett, more humane than Heaney?
The book is, of course, Gulliver’s Travels. Its author wrote his own Latin epitaph, best translated by another Anglo-Irishman, Yeats: “Swift has sailed into his rest;/Savage indignation there/ Cannot lacerate his breast.” Jonathan Swift’s indignation against the follies of mankind was indeed so extreme that he has been savaged himself ever since, by critics who have seen his works as misanthropic and misogynist, the revenge of an embittered man thwarted in his poetical, political and ecclesiastical ambitions. Swift was so scandalous on every level — from the gruesome irony of A Modest Proposal to the scatological reductio ad absurdum of all that polite society held dear in The Lady’s Dressing Room — that his exile from literary London to the Deanery of St Patrick’s, Dublin, has been posthumously extended: hence his present neglect in our schools and universities. David Womersley’s definitive new edition of Gulliver’s Travels, the latest of 18 volumes of Swift’s works published by Cambridge University Press, is thus a major step towards his academic rehabilitation and even vindication.
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