Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Satire, Reading, and Forms of Separation and Union

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 1-6

3. The Gift Half Understood

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 7-15

4. The Flight of Man, the Fall of Icarus and Phaeton

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 16-25

5. The Flying or Floating Island: Lemuel Gulliver and Ideas Disembodied

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 26-37

6. Aesthetics as Asceticism: Stephen Dedalus’s Quest of Transcendence

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 38-53

7. It’s All about Caring and Not-Caring at the Same Time: Or, Home Is Where You Start From

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 54-59

8. Back Matter

   Pages 60-67

   PDF

In a fresh reading of Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Atkins draws parallels between the protagonists: both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the burdens of life, seeking a transcendent existence. The study sheds important new light on both novels as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

• aesthetics
• critique
• novel
• British and Irish Literature

"In an engaging, accessible manner, G. Douglas Atkins re-examines Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in light of Atkins's understanding of the Christian concept of the Incarnation, an understanding deeply influenced by his study of T.S. Eliot. Atkins' well-written study will likely appeal to a wide audience including Swift, Joyce, and Eliot scholars, as well as academic readers more generally." - Bruce Bashford, Associate Professor of English Emeritus, Stony Brook University, USA

G. Douglas Atkins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, USA, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of several awards for outstanding teaching, he is the author of eighteen books and co-editor of three others, including Swift's Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing and six on T.S. Eliot. He is now at work on three other books.

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