Gulliver in the History of Race

被引：0
作者：
Hudson, Nicholas [1 ]
机构：
[1] Univ British Columbia, English, Vancouver, BC, Canada
来源：
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES OF LITERATURE | 2025年 / 9卷 / 01期
关键词：
Swift; Gulliver s' Travels; race; racism; Locke; Leibniz; Linnaeus; Buffon;
D O I：
暂无
中图分类号：
I [文学];
学科分类号：
05 ;
摘要：
This essay revisits the vexed issue of race and racism in Part Four of Gulliver s' Travels, as analyzed brilliantly in Claude Rawson's God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945. Whereas Rawson both resisted charges that Swift's presentation of the Yahoos is racist and cast doubt on defenses of Swift as anti-racist, I argue instead that the tale of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos marks the crossroads between the older, early modern vision of the human species with the modern ideology of racial science coalescing just at that moment in history. Swift draws on the one hand from older myths such as the "Wild Man" or bestial savage but also reflects contemporary debates on the definition of "man" provoked particularly by John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. Our difficulties in placing Swift in the history of race reflects emerging problems of definition and taxonomy that he deliberately exploited in order to perplex the reader.
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页码：101 / 117
页数：17
相关论文
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