Gulliver’s Travels

Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves. Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms-such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier-or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.