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Chapter 6 - Satire

from Part II - Genres

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

Daniel Cook
Affiliation:
University of Dundee
Nicholas Seager
Affiliation:
Keele University
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Summary

The chapter reviews literary contexts for Gulliver’s Travels, surveying relevant earlier texts, and indicating their satiric influence. With little reference to major verse satirists of Greece and Rome, key works include fictional narratives such as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and most significantly the True Histories of Lucan, and his widely copied Dialogues of the Dead. In the Renaissance, we find specific links with More’s Utopia and a general debt to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. An imaginary voyage in space available to Swift is Cyrano de Bergerac’s States and Empires of the Moon. The biggest single influence comes from the twin stories of Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. More modern writers whose practice was known to Swift are seventeenth-century English poets, headed by Dryden, Marvell, Butler, and Rochester. Contemporaries who produced effective satires in prose were Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and William King. The author’s friends in the Scriblerus group, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, naturally left some mark on Gulliver. Overall, the satiric workings of Swift’s masterpiece show abundant traces of these traditions, but its success owes most to his own comic gifts, learning, and capacity at once to attract and disturb the reader.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Satire
  • Edited by Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Nicholas Seager, Keele University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909488.008
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  • Satire
  • Edited by Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Nicholas Seager, Keele University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909488.008
Available formats
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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.

  • Satire
  • Edited by Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Nicholas Seager, Keele University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>
  • Online publication: 05 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108909488.008
Available formats
×