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from Part VI - Social and Intellectual Topics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
This chapter disentangles some of the threads that linked history, demography, and ethnicity in Swift’s imagination. The first part of the chapter looks at the predominant theory of English ethnicity during Swift’s lifetime: the notion that the modern English people were direct descendants of the Anglo Saxons, who were themselves descended from the Gothic peoples of antiquity. The second part considers Swift’s attitude towards the native Irish people. And the final section addresses the treatment of the Yahoos in the fourth voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, in which, it seems, conventional racial tropes dissolve into broad-bottomed misanthropy.
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