Roland M. Frye (essay date 1954)
SOURCE: "Swift's Yahoo and the Christian Symbols for Sin," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XV, No. 2, April, 1954, pp. 201-17.
[Below, Frye discusses ways that Swift's characterization of the Yahoos reflects eighteenth-century Protestant dogma equating the misuse and abuse of reason with sin.]
I
Swift's treatment of the Yahoo in the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels has been the center of a prolonged critical controversy. Involving and epitomizing as it does the so-called...
Source: Literary Criticism (1400-1800), ©1998 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 8172 words.)
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