Essays on Gulliver's Travels

Throughout the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift employs the eight types of satire – parody, understatement, invective, irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, inversion/reversal, and wit – to add historical and thematic depth to Lemuel Gulliver’s fantastic voyage. Explaining the tensions between Liliput and Blefusco in part...

Jonathan Swift, an author whose life straddled the turn of the 17th century, is widely considered to be the greatest satirist in British literary history. Although he is well-versed in poetry and has written a prolific amount of private correspondences, Swift is best known for...

Change is inevitable; it grows with the next generation and time and time again sneaks up on those that are not looking for it. This is true for music, fashion, literature, religion, and even politics. The tide of any of these subjects may change dramatically...

Gulliver in Lilliput Part One Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who has a number of rather incredible adventures, comprising four sections.” In Book I, his ship is blown off course and Gulliver is shipwrecked. In spite of...

In Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift presents a narrative that aims to continually change his audience’s opinion by offering an array of perpetually shifting standpoints. From the start of the journey we see the tale unfold in the same manner as Gulliver experiences it....

Of all the institutions satirized in Jonathon Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” one that has perhaps been less scrutinized is the destruction of the English language. Throughout the travels, language is the key obstacle in Gulliver’s “understanding” of various cultures. Only in book four, however, is the...

Educational practices have evolved in a multitude of ways throughout human history. In Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, each land that Gulliver visits has its own idea of what education should be like for the citizens there. The first land Gulliver visits, Lilliput, which seems...

In an elaborate concoction of political allegory, social anatomy, moral fable, and mock utopia: Gulliver’s Travels is written in the voice of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, an educated, seafaring man voyaging to remote countries for the purpose of contributing to human knowledge. The four books written...

Much has been written about the religion and politics of Gulliver’s Travels, specifically in relation to Part I, A Voyage to Lilliput. Of all of the voyages and peoples that Gulliver, the protagonist of the novel, meets during his several adventures, religion plays the largest...

In his best-known piece of literature, Gulliver’s Travels, Swift conveys the image of a reasonable man through the concept of clothing. He portrays clothing as a projective outer-layer of skin, and he utilises the same notion in A Modest Proposal. He creates a dichotomy between...

Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding. Jonathan Swift When Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726, Swift instantly became history’s most famous misanthrope. Thackeray was not alone in his outrage when he denounced it...

In the voyage to Brobdingnag section of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the title character fits a common psychological profile over 150 years before the theory describing it was technically defined. The story manifestly presupposes the Freudian concept of sublimation of repressed sexual frustration into behavior...

Jonathan Swift was one of the greatest satirists of his time, becoming a national hero of Ireland. After Swift was forgotten by Ireland he made a return by defending Ireland from the English rule. “First, there was The Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland...

During the early 18th century, an explosion of satire swept through British literature. This period, often called the “Age of Reason,” was highly influenced by a group of the elite of society, who called themselves the Augustans and were determined to live their lives according...

Since feudal times, class has played a distinctly formative role within social structure in England. Whether a person resided within the upper class, middle class, or lower class could determine political influence, economic success, and social freedoms alike. In early novels, characters were expected to...

“Satyr is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for the kind of Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it.” -Jonathan Swift Satire has had...

It is human nature to strive for paradise, but is it actually attainable? There have been countless attempts to establish utopian societies, yet ultimately, all have failed. In his work, Gulliver’s Travels, Swift recounts the journeys of Gulliver to various fantastical lands. Each land is...

Writing from a point of view that concludes “that the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other” , Edward Said views Robinson Crusoe as “explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas expansion – directly connected in style...

Johnathan Swift was a man with quite a bit to say. And he believed that for anyone to listen to him they would need to be either shocked or entertained. In his two satirical works, “Gulliver’s Travels” and “A Modest Proposal”, Swift takes two different...

Misanthropic undercurrents have often been detected in Gulliver’s Travels, usually unearthed and expounded in connection to the fourth book of the travelogue. Through Gulliver, the fourth book voices vehement misanthropy, with propounding the peaceful life of Houyhnhnms as an ideal model. Gulliver is the resident...

An opening title card introduces the 1996 movie Fargo as one that is not only based on a true story, but with the exception of name changes made at the request of the survivors, a film that proceeds to present the events of that true...

A child has the ability to make the most critical and objective observation on society and the behavior of man. How is this possible? A child has yet to mature and lacks proper education and experience. However, it is for this very reason that a...

“But the chief end I propose to my self in all my labors is to vex the world” Jonathan Swift In most ironic works there are two voices. Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner explain that in irony, “what the speaker says is intentionally at odds...

The themes of money and rank are clearly present in both Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In both works, the quest for money and a high rank is depicted as a driving force behind human actions and the necessity of money...

It has been said that Dean Jonathan Swift hated humanity but loved the individual. His hatred is brought out in this caustic political and social satire aimed at the English people, humanity in general, and the Whigs in particular. By means of a disarming simplicity...