God, Gulliver, and Genocide Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 [Hardcover]

We are obsessed with barbarians. They are the not us, who don't speak our language, or any language, whom we despise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigor we aspire to, and who have an extraordinary influence on the comportment, and even modes of dress, of our civilized metropolitan lives; whom we often outdo in the barbarism we impute to them; and whose suspected resemblance to us haunts our introspections and imaginings. This book looks afresh at how we have confronted the idea of barbarism, in ourselves and others, from the conquest of the Americas to the Nazi Holocaust, through the voices of many writers, including Montaigne, Swift and Shaw.

Texts and Editions Used
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Indians and Irish
2. The Savage with Hanging Breasts: Gulliver, Female Yahoos, and 'Racism'
3. Killing the Poor: An Anglo-Irish Theme?
4. God, Gulliver, and Genocide
Endnotes
List of Works Cited
Index

Rawson's excellent book analyses 'the spectrum of aggressions' that exists between such figurative use of the language of extermination and its actual fulfillment in historical genocides over the last six centuries. --The Guardian

[An] erudite, passionate book...learned, wide-ranging and acute.... [Rawson is] one of the finest 18th-century specialists, who...is also a critic of striking flair and delicacy. --Terry Eagleton,London Review of Books

Never a scholar to be bound by conventions of periodization...Rawson has written a book of major importance for genres ranging from Renaissance encounter literature to modern Holocaust fiction. But his greatest gift has always been for torpedoing the prevailing assumptions of eighteenth-century studies, and in this bold new account of Swift, and the implications arising for other writers, he has done it, explosively, again. --The Times Literary Suppleml“'