Inescapable Bodies, Disquieting Perception: Why Adults Seek to Tame and Harness Swiftʹs Excremental Satire in Gulliverʹs Travels

Jonathan Swiftʹs Gulliverʹs Travels is a complex, uninhibited, savage satire that concludes with the narratorʹs descent into madness—hardly a likely candidate for childrenʹs reading. In the nearly three hundred years since it was first published, however, Gulliverʹs Travels has become associated with childrenʹs literature, though it is usually abridged, bowdlerized, and/or totally transformed. This essay examines changes commonly made to the text and concludes that these changes reveal how adults wield the tools of revision and abridgement in order to maintain an adult–child dichotomy characterized by power differentials