Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist

In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized modernity represented by the new Newtonian science. Boyle (English, Fordham U.) views the motif of the modern in Swift's works via Aristotle's theory of satire and modern critiques. Like the mirror that Nemesis used to destroy Narcissus in the myth Freud analyzed, Swift's Gulliver is a narcissist who reflects back his Enlightenment critics despite Swift's assertion that "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own...." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


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