SOURCE: Mezciems, Jenny. “Swift and Orwell: Utopia as Nightmare.” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 15, no. 3 (1985): 189-210.

In the following essay, Mezciems compares the utopian fiction of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell.

It seems appropriate that, at a Utopian conference in 1984, one should think of Swift in relation to this significant date and with substantial reference to Orwell's view of Gulliver's Travels as well as to his own dystopian fictions. Utopian fictions (to give definitional priority to the positive side of the genre), being essentially timeless and placeless, cannot be considered only in terms of the time at which they were written, or of particular local circumstances in the real world. They have a habit of breaking down tidy period divisions and neat chronological ordering. The year 1984 will pass; indeed it was pointed out several years ago by some expert on our calendar that we are some six...