The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe (The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe)

Jonathan Swift has had a profound impact on almost all the national literatures of Continental Europe. The celebrated author of acknowledged masterpieces like A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), the Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, was courted by innumerable translators, adaptors, and retellers, admired and challenged by shoals of critics, and creatively imitated by both novelists and playwrights, not only in Central Europe (Germany and Switzerland) but also in its northern (Denmark and Sweden) and southern (Italy, Spain, and Portugal) outposts, as well as its eastern (Poland and Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and Western parts - from the beginning of the 18th century to the present day.

Hermann J.Real is Professor of English at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, and Director of the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies.

Elinor Shaffer, FBA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, has published on Romantic and Victorian literature, is author of 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, edited the annual journal Comparative Criticism, and most recently has contributed to Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain.