Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) has always been a controversial figure, a political combatant in British history, a national hero in Ireland, and arguably the greatest satirist in world literature. Along with A Modest Proposal (the one about inappropriate food choices), he immortalized himself with Gulliver’s Travels, a work much loved of children for its fantastic immersion experience among big people and little people—but which has long divided opinion among adults for its exposure of the worst in human nature. His contemporaries loved him for his comic genius. The Victorians of the next century thought he must have been mad. To those who lived through the nightmare of twentieth-century world warfare, Swift seemed not only sane but a prophet.

For this lecture, Thomas Lockwood (English, University of Washington) tells the story of these controversies and the extraordinary works of imagination that provoked them. An internationally-known scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, Lockwood is working on a book, Lowlife: Representations of Social Inferiority in Britain, 1660-1830, as well as a volume on The Life of Jonathan Swift for the Blackwell “Critical Biography” series.