An overview of Gulliver's Travels
Critic:deepfakes Karen R. Bloom
Source: Exploring Novels, Gale, 1998
Criticism about: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), also known as: Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier, Simon Waystaff
序数词Genre(s): Satires; Political satires; Political literature; Novels; Plays; Poetry; Essays
[In the following essay, Bloom, a doctoral candidate at Emory University, explores the historical and cultural background of Swift's satire and explains the differing interpretations of the ending of 2011上海英语高考Gulliver's Travels.]
主要作品headquarter：Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, first published in 1726, was an instant hit, one of the top three llers of the eighteenth century. It was only one of Swift's many significant works, however. Of his pro writings, the most famous include his attack on mo
kingsoftdern literature, 镶是什么意思The Battle of the Books; a critique of English oppression of the Irish, A Modest Proposal; and A Tale of a Tub, his defen of Protestantism and the Church of England. He is also well-known as a poet, particularly for his poems criticizing romance, such as Cassinus and Peter and 四六级报名时间A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. Gulliver's Travels address almost all of Swift's primary concerns and involves some of the most important questions in literature and the development of the novel.
Gulliver's Travels remains Swift's most famous and popular work. Ricardo Quintana calls it a "satire taking the form of four imaginary voyages," a formulation which explains why the story does not have the traditional plot structure of rising action-climax-denouement. Becau Swift depicts the ills and sins of his society, Gulliver's Travels呆若木鸡翻译 can feel like a string of episodes tied together. The book gets its unity from Gulliver himlf, since his perceptions drive the story and the satire. Swift us Gulliver and his voyages primarily to examine problems with contemporary society, such as the evils of politics, humanity's frequent foolishness, and the importance of a thoughtful, lf-aware, balanced perspective. In this n, Gulliver's Travels address issues that still worry
people today. A recent television version also testifies to the book's continued appeal. Although this version is generally faithful in many places, however, it is no substitute for the book.
叙事风格和效果：Swift's story takes place simultaneously at two points in time and at two levels of meaning. First, it is a recollection: Lemuel Gulliver tells the story of his adventures after they are finished. The story of Gulliver sitting at home writing about his voyages is the "frame narrative," the story of the telling of the story. Like a frame around a painting, it gives shape to Gulliver's character and to the events that he recounts. As Richard Rodino writes, "Swift the author writes the story of Gulliver the author writing the story of Gulliver the character." Second, all the events except the frame narrative take place in the past. The two levels of time enable Swift to create a work that also has two levels of meaning: the straightforward story of Gulliver's adventures, and the satire of Swift's world. By making Gulliver look back on his life and explain it, Swift allows readers to e Gulliver as unreliable, a man who opinions must be questioned.
moonlighting
时代背景和swift之伟大之处：The two levels of meaning, the adventure and the satire, come from Swift's u of a popular kind of literature, the travel narrative. It is important to remember while reading Gulliver's Travels that Swift's world was very different from ours. Captain Cook had not yet sailed around the world; he would not be born until 1728. Lewis and Clark would not head west across North America for another venty years, and much of the continent was still inhabited only by Native American tribes. It was not unusual to be the first westerners to discover new islands (the Dutch found Easter Island in 1722), to make the first maps of a coast, or to find strange and exotic people, plants, and animals. The eighteenth-century public was as excited to read about travels to strange lands such as Africa, India, and the Middle East, as well as North and South America, as the twentieth-century public is to hear about celebrities. They were also ud to a wider diversity of reading material, and, becau it was so hard to prove things were true, were more comfortable with not knowing whether a story was fiction or not.
doble陌生化手法：The travel narrative did more than allow Swift to create an exciting "true" story, however. It also gave him a way to criticize the familiar world of eighteenth-century
England. Swift "defamiliarized" aspects of English life such as political or social practices by having Gulliver describe them to people who had never encountered them before, or as if they were things he had never en before. In some cas, this defamiliarization is amusing. When the Lilliputians arch Gulliver's pockets, for example, they find a "Globe, half Silver, and half some transparent Metal: For on the transparent Side we saw certain strange Figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, until we found our Fingers stopped with that lucid Substance. He put this Engine to our Ears, which made an incessant Noi like that of a Water-Mill." What is this unusual object? A pocket watch. By making aspects of England such as fashions or the government em strange to Gulliver or the people he meets, Swift could make tho aspects em strange to his readers, which in turn could make readers e how silly or bad the aspects of their lives really were.
