Les Voyages de Gulliver: Mondes lointains ou mondes proche ed. by Daniel Carey and François Boulaire (review)

73 Ms. Welcher’s exhaustive approach is thus both a blessing and a bane. One might be disappointed by the lack of the Travels in much of the Gulliveriana catalogued here, yet this study stands as a fascinating window into the visual habits and proclivities of the eighteenthcentury, which in turn reveals Ms. Welcher as much an insightful cultural historian as a critic of Swift’s work. W. B. Gerard Auburn University Montgomery Jonathan Swift: Poems, ed. Derek Mahon . London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Pp. xx ⫹ 122. £4.99. Working against a bias toward Augustan literary and cultural values, Mr. Mahon , a poet himself, presents a Swift that is surprisingly modern. Prefacing this slim anthology (a little more than 100 as against the 950 plus pages in PatRogers’s Complete Poems, Penguin, 1983), Mr. Mahon gives new life to the transparent octosyllabic couplets. Deliberately provocative, he includes ephemeral and outré verse by Augustan standards, such as ‘‘Mary the Cook Maid’s Letter to Dr Sheridan,’’but not the usualchoice(PatRogers’s)‘‘TheHumble Petition of Frances Harris.’’ Or consider gallows humor, of which Swift was a keen player; Mr. Mahon has two hanging poems: ‘‘Clever Tom Clinch’’ and ‘‘An Excellent New Ballad or, the true English Dean to be hang’d for a Rape.’’ What could bemorerelevantinthistimeofclerical high jinks than: By old popish Cannons, as Wise Men have, Penn’d’em Each Priest had a Concubine, jure Ecclesiœ. . . . . But, Lord how the Rabble will stare and will gape, When the good English Dean is hang’d up for a Rape. Teachers using this inexpensive volume will also find the usual choices: ‘‘Description of the Morning,’’ ‘‘City Shower,’’ Cadenus and Vanessa (only selections), ‘‘The Lady’s Dressing Room,’’three Stella birthday pieces, ‘‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’’ (only selections), ‘‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.’’ But many will be surprised at the inclusion of trifles, such as ‘‘To Mrs. Houghton.’’ As the Preface makes clear, Swift becomes more interesting as he becomes more personal : ‘‘Admirers of Augustan elegance and post-modern ‘cool’ will find him a remarkably hot-headed figure.’’ Notwithstanding Swift’s negative remarks about living in Irish exile, Mr. Mahon makes an heroic attempt to pull him into an Irish populist anti-sublime. He had an affinity with the Gaelic poets, particularly in ‘‘the vehemenceofhissatire,’’ mentioning Carolan and Eoghan O Rathaille . As in the paranoid style of Irish poetry, Swift ‘‘had good reason to think himself persecuted.’’ Mr. Mahon stresses the poet’s influence on Yeats, Kavanagh, and Beckett—especially the bitter laugh of the last, which is also Swift’s. Many observations are on the mark, for example , ‘‘Swift is aRabelaisianinaBrechtian world.’’ His so-called misogyny is ‘‘breezy, play acting,’’but he takes women seriously (unlike his contemporaries, Pope?). Where others see a cool attack on Augustan sins, Mr. Mahon sees an unfolding ‘‘psychodrama.’’ Les Voyages de Gulliver: Mondes lointains ou mondes proche, ed. DanielCarey and FrançoisBoulaire.Caen:Caen,2002. Pp. 173. £14.50. This is another collection to introduce postgraduate students to Gulliver’s Trav- 74 els. In ‘‘Jonathan Swift: Angleterre, Irlande et patriotisme protestant, 1688– 1735,’’ François Boulaire adequately emphasizesthereignsofQueenAnneand George I, without forgetting the Irish context. In ‘‘Lashing the Vice: Jonathan Swift, Satire, and Nature’s Designs,’’Jefferson Holdridge stresses ‘‘the Gaelic literary and cultural tradition’’ in a paper that relies heavily on Robert Elliott’s and Michael Seidel’s work. Likewise, Eileen Douglas’s ‘‘In ‘a glass darkly’: Swift, Gulliver and the Human Shape’’ deals with ‘‘the human shape’’ as ‘‘the leading quality’’ in the definition of the human species in the Travels and in Swift’s Irish writings of the previous decade. Stephen Karian discusses well-known issues of textual history in ‘‘The Texts of Gulliver’s Travels.’’ Examining Gulliver ’s ‘‘models’’ in ‘‘Gulliver’’: voyages et véracité,’’ Jan Borm goes back to Herodotus , Lucian, and Dampier, and concludes that in travel literature, the borderline between fiction and nonfiction can be blurred. In ‘‘Gulliver’s Travels and the language debates of Swift’s time,’’ Anne Mulhall discusses the political and religious implications of the plain style in Restoration England, not mentioning that contempt of complicated rhetoric had initially been advocated by early...