Inescapable bodies, disquieting perception: Why adults seek to tame and harness Swift's excremental satire in 'Gulliver's Travels'

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels is a complex, uninhibited, savage satire that concludes with the narrator's descent into madness--harldy a likely candidate for children's reading. In the nearly three hundred years since it was first published, however, Gulliver's Travels has become associated with children's literature, though it is usually abridged, bowdlerized, and/or totally transformed. This essay examines changes commonly made to the text and concludes that these changes reveal how adults wield the tools of revision and abridgement in order to maintain an adult-child dichotomy characterized by power differentials.