Review by Choice Review
An undistinguished example of the proliferation of self-help books for students worried about mastering controversies in literary criticism. It is really a bibliographical essay, not a book, and its taxonomy of approaches may give the reader a misleading sense of comprehensiveness instead of meaningful selectivity. We are told at the end of the introduction that the "most impressive of recent theoretically informed contributions" to Swift criticism are "the essays of Edward Said," but we hear no more about this category of approach or its practitioners. Swift criticism is instead divided into "author-centred," "formal and rhetorical," and "historical and contextual" approaches; the author's own reading of Gulliver's Travels is a traditional thematic study. No mention is made of any feminist criticism of Swift, such as Ellen Pollak's The Poetics of Sexual Myth (CH, Feb '86); and the important theoretical inflection of Carole Fabricant's Swift's Landscape (CH, Apr '83)--Althusserian ideology critique--is ignored, though the book is mentioned. Such a study may perhaps prove useful in contexts where time is short and library resources are limited, but it is no substitute for a scholarly study of Swift's critical reception or for reading the critics themselves. D. Landry University of Southern California
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
