SOURCE: "Swift and Romance," in Walking Naboth's Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, edited by Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, pp. 98-126.

Below, Doody argues that Swift's Gulliver's Travels, like all significant Western texts, builds on and is connected to the entire Western literary canon.

My topic may seem perverse. After all, in Gulliver's Travels, as we remember, the palace at Lilliput is set on fire "by the Carelessness of a Maid of Honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a Romance."¹ We may take this, if we will, as a symptom of Swift's own distrust of novelistic narrative of all kinds; the romance here is associated not only with female waste of time but also with incendiarism.² Moreover, this particular romance evidently committed the crowning sin of being boring. It is certainly but a poor compliment to the romance in question, which...