A controversial satire of eighteenth-century British culture and politics, Gulliver's Travels (1726) is one of Jonathan Swift's best-known works. The tale of Lemuel Gulliver's voyage to fantastical locales is famous for confounding generations of readers who have attempted to make sense of its jumble of genre elements, and Daniel Cook's introduction offers a friendly and thorough guide to navigating it. The Norton Library edition presents the text of the 1735 edition, including original maps and illustrations.
A controversial satire of eighteenth-century British culture and politics, Gulliver's Travels (1726) is one of Jonathan Swift's best-known works. The tale of Lemuel Gulliver's voyage to fantastical locales is famous for confounding generations of readers who have attempted to make sense of its jumble of genre elements, and Daniel Cook's introduction offers a friendly and thorough guide to navigating it. The Norton Library edition presents the text of the 1735 edition, including original maps and illustrations.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to English parents, in 1667. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, he was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1795 and later served for more than three decades as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In 1704, he published the religious-themed A Tale of a Tub, the first of the trenchantly satirical works on which his reputation rests. Along with his friends Alexander Pope and John Gay, Swift helped make the eighteenth century a golden age of social and political satire in Britain. After a brief stint as a Tory pamphleteer in London, the self-styled Irish patriot returned to Dublin in 1714. In later years, he vented what he called his “savage indignation” in a wide range of literary registers, from the Rabelaisian humor of his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), to the dystopian vision of infanticide in A Modest Proposal (1729). He died in 1745. Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee in Scotland. After completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge, he held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Bristol, a Visiting Professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and library fellowships at Harvard and Yale. He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013).
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