Page 139 - Gullivers

While Swist tried hard to pass off his most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), as the autobiographical writing of one Lemuel Gulliver those who knew him quickly identified Swist as the author. Since then Swist and Gulliver
have become inseparable and his fame is due, in many quarters, to this text alone. Few readers, especially outside Ireland, are aware of Swist’s other masterpieces and even fewer are alert to his important influence on Anglo- Irish writing. If, like Gulliver, we travel beyond the shores of Swist’s singular ‘novel’ we find a range of writing duly celebrated for its innovation and most
of all, for its inventive satire, its powerful insights, and in some cases, its political influence.
We also find in Swist’s writing an influential literary model adopted
and adapted very successfully by successive generations of Anglo-Irish writers and this essay will highlight Swist’s literary legacy and will explore how it
is registered in subsequent classics, including the writing of Maria Edgeworth, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.
Swist was master of the political and philosophical satire, a prolific pœt and essayist, a travel writer, a novelist and, through Gulliver’s Travels, he is
also considered a children’s author. While his œuvre embraces many literary forms one of the most striking features of Swist’s writing is its blending of literary genres within individual texts. However, it must be remembered that literature in the eighteenth century was not divided into distinct genres. Pœtic writing was, of course, recognised as a separate literary form but prose was not always segregated into categories. During Swist’s lifetime fiction was in its infancy and the novel did not exist in the way we understand it in its modern form. Its subsequent division into romance, thriller, mystery writing (or one
of the many other sub-categories we now recognise) was not yet established. Travel writing too, for obvious reasons, was an expanding arena. Writers in the eighteenth century were not constrained by our current conventions and, even had they existed, it is doubtful that Swist would have observed them anyway.
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 133