The Little People in Art: A Note on a Lacuna in the Reception of Gulliver’s Travels (Part I)
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Abstract
The Swift industry has paid little attention to the intricate ways in which the Dean’s fiction and poetry are linked to visual art. Focusing on the initial scene in Gulliver’s Travels, this article analyses some of the rhizomes connecting Swift’s verbal representations with iconotexts and images of the Renaissance showing giants and pygmies. In doing so, the article is inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze on the rhizome, that is, networks of representation that can be connected to any given artwork. The point here is not to show which paintings or graphic art Swift knew but to trace some of the rich fields of rhizomes with which his satire engages in multiple, ironic ways.
Swift critics have argued that the initial scene in Gulliver’s Travels is mainly indebted to an ekphrasis in Philostratus’ Imagines (of which Swift owned a copy published in 1608). Discussing visual art by Dosso Dossi and Cranach the Younger as well as engravings and emblem books showing Hercules (or Polyphemus) and the pygmies, this contribution shows how Gulliver’s Travels draws on, and also plays with, images derived from Renaissance art.