Gulliver’s Travels

Product Description

Lemuel Gulliver’s love of travel and inability to stay on course deliver him to unexpected visits with the very short Lilliputians, the very large Brobdingnagians, the very reasonable Houynhms – who are horses, and the excessively scientific citizens of Laputa. A classic of English literature, Gulliver’s Travels has amused children and fascinated adults for nearly three centuries.

Review

“An excellent edition: I have used the Penguin edition, but yours is superior. The notes are much more useful, especially in a history class in which the context of the work is emphasized.”–Winfield J.C. Meyers, University of Georgia

“The best cheap paperback edition available with an excellent, informative, and readable introduction by Paul Turner.”–W.G. Walton, Jr., Meredith College

“This edition has excellent notes – better than Penguins. Aim for their market with more editions of this quality and you’ll capture much of their market.” –Winfield J. Myers, University of Georgia

From the Back Cover

Gulliver set sail not knowing what fantastic adventures await him. First he is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput where the people are only six inches high! Then, he voyages to Brobdingnag, a land of towering giants. Will Gulliver ever make it back home?

About the Author

The PUFFIN CLASSICS series contains work by the most renowned writers, titles include: THE CANTERBURY TALES, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, JANE EYRE, LORNA DOONE, KIM, THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, POLLYANNA and FRANKENSTEIN.

From the Publisher

This book is perfect for AP classes and is often selected for inclusion on the AP exam. The notes, reading pointers, and vocabulary in this addition will also help students at a lower reading level get the most out of these classics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Michael Seidel’s Introduction to Gulliver’s Travels
When pressed to write up his own account of his travels by the captain who rescued him from Brobdingnag, Lemuel Gulliver says, “I thought we were already overstocked with books of travels: that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary”. Gulliver has an odd sense of his experiences if he thinks they would pass for anything but extraordinary, and extraordinary they certainly are. Gulliver’s Travels was a phenomenal success upon its publication in October 1726, read as eagerly and voraciously by all classes of English society as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had been a few years before, in 1719. The poet and dramatist John Gay wrote Swift about the reception of the Travels in London: “From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet-council to the nursery” (October 28, 1726). Within a year of its publication, editions of Gulliver’s Travels were pirated and translated on the European continent. Its famous episodes and its nomenclature—Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Yahoos—are to this day recognized all over the world, from Gulliver theme parks in Japan to the most up-to-date dictionaries of modern slang.
How did Gulliver’s Travels get written and what were Jonathan Swift’s motives in writing it? In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Swift shared certain obsessions with others, namely a group of writers, statesmen, and professionals who called themselves the Scriblerus Club, consisting of the poets Alexander Pope, Thomas Parnell, and John Gay, the Queen’s physician, John Arbuthnot, and the chief minister of state, Robert Harley. Under the general direction of Pope, one of the club’s primary projects was a volume of memoirs written purportedly by the invented character who gave the club its name, Martin Scriblerus, a modern hack-writer or scribbler (the terms were interchangeable) who embodied all the cultural, intellectual, and political vacuities of the early eighteenth century as Pope, Swift, and their friends saw them.
In 1713 Pope assigned Swift the sixteenth chapter of a proposed