The Italian Reception of Swift

This essay investigates Jonathan Swift's Italian reception from the eighteenth century to present times. It provides an analysis of both Swift's critical reception and of the several translations and adaptations of his works, in particular "Gulliver's Travels" but also his poems and other prose writings. The essay aims at offering new critical and archival insight into the critical and cultural status of Swift's ideas and works in Italy, which changed over the centuries, from a widespread admiration in the eighteenth century, through a general deprecation of his life and works in the nineteenth century and his revaluation as social critic in the twentieth century. The essay is completed by a detailed bibliography (pp. 285-293) of the Italian translations of Swift's works and of the most important books and articles on him.

This essay traces Jonathan Swift’s reception in Italy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It shows how early Italian interest, centred in Venice and mediated largely through French translations, made "Gulliver’s Travels" Swift’s principal vehicle of fame. During the eighttenth century, Swift was admired as a satirist, prose stylist, and model for journalism, but the nineteenth century brought neglect, abridgement, and the reduction of "Gulliver's Travels" to children’s literature. Twentieth-century translators and critics gradually recovered the range, irony, and intellectual complexity of Swift’s writing, culminating in a postwar “Swift renaissance” that established him more securely within Italian literary culture and scholarship.