Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels
- The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Genres
- Chapter 5 Popular Fiction
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Chapter 7 Travel Writing
- Chapter 8 Philosophical Tale
- Part III Reading Gulliver’s Travels
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Chapter 7 - Travel Writing
from Part II - Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels
- The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Genres
- Chapter 5 Popular Fiction
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Chapter 7 Travel Writing
- Chapter 8 Philosophical Tale
- Part III Reading Gulliver’s Travels
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Summary
When, on 28 October 1726, the Travels of a certain Lemuel Gulliver came out, its author couldn’t have made a better choice to attract a large audience when he gave his most famous satire the framework of a travel account, one of the most popular genres of the time. Swift was an avid reader of travel books himself, and from his reading he was able to endow Gulliver with the characteristics of a life-like traveller and enrich his account with numerous topical elements the reader would recognize as typical of the genre. Whether all these parallels and similarities were actually sources in the sense that Swift’s imagination fed on them is not really important. What matters is the fact that the reader met with authentic elements she was accustomed to when she expected to read a travel book. Swift employed this strategy of authentification in the Travels in order to increase the impact of the satiric shock of his attack on the political and human corruptions of his time. They were also a clever sham, a wild goose chase with deceptive potential, playing on the gullibility of the readers, who had no way of verifying Gulliver’s account unless they set sail themselves.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels , pp. 85 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023