God, Gulliver, and Genocide Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945

"God, Gulliver, and Genocide explores the range of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech and their implementation, from the book of Genesis to the present day, but more especially in the period between the conquest to the Americas and the end of World War II. It examines a wide variety of authors and voices, chiefly Montaigne and Swift, but also Bartolome de las Casas and Jean de Lery, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and travel-writers and ethnographers from Columbus and Vespucci to Bougainville and Cook. Behind all these stand those mass-catastrophes in Genesis, the Deluge and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, with their grim and quizzical relation to the mass-slaughters of human history, culminating in the Second World War."--BOOK JACKET.