God, Gulliver, and Genocide

God, Gulliver, and Genocide
Author: Claude Julien Rawson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2002
Genre: Aggressiveness in literature
ISBN: 9780199257508

We are obsessed with 'barbarians'. They are the 'not us', who don't speak our language, or 'any language', whom we depise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigour we aspire to, and who have an extraordinaryinfluence on the comportment, and even modes of dress, of our civilised metropolitan lives; whom we often outdo in the barbarism we impute to them; and whose suspected resemblance to us haunts our introspections and imaginings. They come in two overlapping categories, ethnic others and home-grownpariahs: conquered infidels and savages, the Irish, the poor, the Jews. This book looks afresh at how we have confronted the idea of 'barbarism', in ourselves and others, from 1492 to 1945, through the voices of many writers, chiefly Montaigne, Swift and, to a lesser extent, Shaw.

God, Gulliver, and Genocide

God, Gulliver, and Genocide
Author: Claude Julien Rawson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

"God, Gulliver, and Genocide explores the range of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech and their implementation, from the book of Genesis to the present day, but more especially in the period between the conquest to the Americas and the end of World War II. It examines a wide variety of authors and voices, chiefly Montaigne and Swift, but also Bartolome de las Casas and Jean de Lery, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and travel-writers and ethnographers from Columbus and Vespucci to Bougainville and Cook. Behind all these stand those mass-catastrophes in Genesis, the Deluge and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, with their grim and quizzical relation to the mass-slaughters of human history, culminating in the Second World War."--BOOK JACKET.

The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels

The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels
Author: Daniel Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-10-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108904424

Approaching Gulliver's Travels from a variety of critical perspectives, this Cambridge Companion provides students and researchers with a multifaceted understanding of the enduring legacy of one of literature's most profound and provocative works of fiction in the lead-up to the 300th anniversary of its first publication.

Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
Author: Frank Palmeri
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2020-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351929410

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

Confronting Genocide

Confronting Genocide
Author: René Provost
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2010-11-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9048198402

“Never again” stands as one the central pledges of the international community following the end of the Second World War, upon full realization of the massive scale of the Nazi extermination programme. Genocide stands as an intolerable assault on a sense of common humanity embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other fundamental international instruments, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Charter. And yet, since the Second World War, the international community has proven incapable of effectively preventing the occurrence of more genocides in places like Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan. Is genocide actually preventable, or is “ever again” a more accurate catchphrase to capture the reality of this phenomenon? The essays in this volume explore the complex nature of genocide and the relative promise of various avenues identified by the international community to attempt to put a definitive end to its occurrence. Essays focus on a conceptualization of genocide as a social and political phenomenon, on the identification of key actors (Governments, international institutions, the media, civil society, individuals), and on an exploration of the relative promise of different means to prevent genocide (criminal accountability, civil disobedience, shaming, intervention).

Legacies of Orientalism and Slavery in European Intellectual and Literary History

Legacies of Orientalism and Slavery in European Intellectual and Literary History
Author: John Docker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2024-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 103640837X

This book is an exercise in ethical criticism. It draws on and works with ideas and suggestions from two of its notable exponents, Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum, who propose that we regard cultural texts as “friends” with whom we can enjoy productive conversations that address contemporary challenges and developments, such as coercive control in gender relations, imperial and colonial thinking, and the centuries-long history of slavery. Throughout, attention is drawn to female agency in figures from Joan of Arc, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe through to Princess Diana. The book begins by looking closely at The Thousand and One Nights in terms of its wayward narratology, its displays of female power, and its significance for arguments over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the conceptual underpinnings of the Holocaust. Montesquieu in Persian Letters and Voltaire in Zadig destabilise any certainty that the Enlightenment was straightforward or easily definable. After evoking a slavery thread in chapters on Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Mansfield Park, Patricia Rozema’s film Mansfield Park, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, the book concludes with a radical re-reading of Middlemarch.

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift, New Edition

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift, New Edition
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2009
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 1438113900

Presents a collection of essays analyzing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels, including a chronology of the author's works and life.

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy
Author: Janelle Pötzsch
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498521541

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift’s writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift’s criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift’s political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.

The Novels of Daniel Defoe, Part I Vol 3

The Novels of Daniel Defoe, Part I Vol 3
Author: W R Owens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351220683

Daniel Defoe is known as the father of the English novel. This is the modern critical edition of Defoe's novels. It brings together all three parts of "Robinson Crusoe" and examines their relationship. The editorial material includes an introduction to each novel, explanatory endnotes, textual notes, and a consolidated index in volume 10.

The Snare in the Constitution

The Snare in the Constitution
Author: Zouheir Jamoussi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144381542X

This comparative study of Defoe’s and Swift’s treatments of liberty embraces what seemed the most significant parts of their vast, multifaceted oeuvres, both non-fictional and fictional. Defoe’s and Swift’s positions with regard to the English constitution and liberties are assessed here through a close examination of their views on contemporary religious and political issues. Moreover, their involvement in the debates on the liberties and constitutions of Scotland and Ireland, respectively, could not be left out of this comparative approach to their treatments of liberty in the broader sense. Also of primary concern is the liberty of expression and of the press underlined (though ambiguously) by both authors as an essential precondition for any debate, political or otherwise. The antithetic relationship between “snare” and “liberty” is examined in the context of the analogy between the political constitution (the body politic) and the human constitution (the natural body) commonly drawn in early 18th century political writings, including Defoe’s and Swift’s. This analogy provides appropriate means of identifying important links within, as well as between, the two authors’ works, since both focused on “snares” in the political and human constitutions. The part of the study devoted to the “snare” in human nature mainly considers the fictional works. Much attention has been given in this regard to the contrasting ways in which both authors have dealt with those “snares” and the interaction between the human and the political constitutions.