Personations: The Political Body in Jonathan Swift's Fiction (Critical Essay‪)‬

Although Gulliver's Travels is perhaps the single most celebrated work of early Irish prose fiction, the idea of Jonathan Swift as a writer of fiction still meets with suspicion. His work is commonly viewed as traditionalist satire that makes only instrumental and cursory use of narrative fiction. This essay seeks to extend such debates by arguing that Swift's writing engages with non-literary fictions, namely the fictive modes of individuality and political representation encountered in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). The essay shows how, by providing delusive fictions of personal and social integrity, Hobbes's metaphors of the political body shape the narrative and rhetoric of Gulliver's Travels. **********