Comedy and Madness in Swift: The Idiosyncrasies of Lemuel Gulliver

摘要

Jonathan Swift has gone down in popular and theoretical history as both a visionary satirist and a confirmed misanthrope. This paper will revisit and challenge the latter assignation by questioning whether the protagonist in Swift’s seminal work?Gulliver’s Travels?is, as is often supposed, a ‘human instrument’ used to further Swift’s own misanthropic agenda.