Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:06:56.656Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - Advertisements and Authorship

from Part III - Reading Gulliver’s Travels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

Daniel Cook
Affiliation:
University of Dundee
Nicholas Seager
Affiliation:
Keele University
Get access

Summary

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×