Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home

In a fresh reading of Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Atkins draws parallels between the protagonists: both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the burdens of life, seeking a transcendent existence. The study sheds important new light on both novels as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

"In an engaging, accessible manner, G. Douglas Atkins re-examines Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in light of Atkins's understanding of the Christian concept of the Incarnation, an understanding deeply influenced by his study of T.S. Eliot. Atkins' well-written study will likely appeal to a wide audience including Swift, Joyce, and Eliot scholars, as well as academic readers more generally." - Bruce Bashford, Associate Professor of English Emeritus, Stony Brook University, USA

Autorentext

G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of eighteen books and co-editor of three others, including Swift's Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing and six on T.S. Eliot. He is now at work on three other books.

Inhalt

1. Satire, Reading, and Forms of Separation and Union 2. The Gift Half Understood 3. The Flight of Man, the Fall of Icarus and Phaeton 4. The Flying or Floating Island: Lemuel Gulliver and Ideas Disembodied 5. Aesthetics as Asceticism: Stephen Dedalus's Quest of Transcendence 6. It's All About Caring and Not-Caring at the Same Time: Or, Home Is Where You Start From