Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy (review)

Reviewed by: Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy Trevor Ross (bio) Nicholas Hudson and Aaron Santesso, eds. Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. US$99. xiv+304pp. ISBN 978-0-521-87955-2. The title of this collection may give an inexact impression of its contents. Only one of sixteen contributors deals extensively with Swift’s Travels; his poetry receives rather more attention. Only one, Marjorie Perloff, considers Swift’s legacy understood as an acknowledged influence on a later author’s work—Beckett’s, in this case—and hers is the only essay to treat satire’s legacy beyond the early nineteenth century. Several contributors are concerned not with Swift’s legacy but with his literary inheritance, from his debt to More to his contempt for Dryden. Finally, the collection is a festschrift in all but name for Claude Rawson, the pre-eminent Swift scholar of the past half-century, and so it is as much about Rawson’s legacy as Swift’s. Virtually all of the contributors, which include many of Rawson’s most distinguished peers, open their essays by citing or quoting approvingly from his work. And if none of the essays is as ample or forceful as Rawson’s typically are, the authors honour his influence by replicating many of his strengths and preoccupations as a critic: his range and breadth of comparison, his alertness to tonal inflections and rhetorical stress-points, his longstanding emphasis on the unsettling and often rebarbative nature of eighteenth-century satire, and occasionally his penchant for pluralized abstractions (“human potentials,” “moral intensities,” “paradoxical intimacies”). The essays also variously follow what the volume’s editors call the “methodologies of Rawson’s writing,” in particular his mode of richly contextualized close reading (2). The history of ideas supports extended analyses by Jonathan Lamb on Hobbesian fantasies of authority in A Tale of a Tub, Barbara Benedict on the anti-empirical representation of material objects in Swift’s poetry, and Nicholas Hudson on Pope’s artful negotiation of the barriers of social class. The modulations of genre are explored in essays by David Rosen and Aaron Santesso on the decay of allegorical conceptions of society from Utopia to Gulliver, Ian Higgins on how Swift’s satire draws on an older tradition of extremist polemics in English political pamphlets, Thomas Keymer on how Fielding’s fiction similarly appropriates and modifies the aggressive humour of popular jestbooks, and Peter Sabor on how Austen’s mocking annotations to Goldsmith’s History of England are an implicit rebuke of the positivistic assumption that historical narratives can and must present impartial accounts of national events. Publishing history is mined by Howard Erskine-Hill for evidence of Swift’s self-censoring and defeatism in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” and by James McLaverty on how in their later satires Swift grew more cautious as Pope became less so about naming names. In comparative [End Page 382] essays, Stephen Zwicker takes Swift to task for being “utterly unresponsive” to Dryden’s complex uses of irony (86), Perloff sees Beckett’s fiction as sharing the intense negativity of Swift’s satire while producing irony that is more uncertain and “free-floating” (281), and, in an especially Rawsonlike close reading of Austen’s “voices,” Jenny Davidson shows how the novelist followed Swift in experimenting with first-person narration to create complicated ironic effects. Also Rawsonian in their comparative reach are two surveys of literary and visual motifs: Harold Love on satiric representations of English spas or “wells,” and Ronald Paulson on the parodying of the Eucharist through images of gaping mouths in works by Hogarth, Goya, and Domenico Tiepolo. Rawson has most significantly contributed to our understanding of Swift’s writings through his sensitive examinations of how their satiric energies emanate from feelings of alienation that are at once strenuously disguised and violently ambivalent. Two standout essays in the collection extend this idea in relation to Swift’s later work. Pat Rogers notes how, unable to reconcile himself to a life of exile, Swift continued to set much of his poetry in London as if he...

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