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.

“The Sophists” generally refers to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon, as well as to a few lesser-known fifth-century figures; but why it does so, and what holds these men together, has been a matter of debate from Plato’s time to our own. Neither of the two standard explanations fit all and only these figures – the philosophical one, that they share some revolutionary epistemological outlook (for instance, relativism or anti-realism), or the sociological one, that they are primarily teachers of virtue of pay. This Introduction proposes revisiting the Sophists as celebrated instances of their time, a period of energetic intellectual discovery, experimentation, and communication. Doing so opens new questions about their continuity with their background culture as well as any distinctive interests, methods, or beliefs they might have. The Introduction goes on to discuss all early uses of the term sophistês in the fifth century (from Pindar through Thucydides) and its dominant uses in the fourth century, allowing us to see the range of kinds of people it applied to and the force with which it was applied. Then it describes the heterogeneous evidence base for Sophists and cognate figures. It concludes with a summary of the volume’s chapters.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.

The chapter presents the Sophists’ more original contributions to political thought and shows how some of their ideas, which were often developed in the course of their practice as advisors or pedagogues, influenced the work of the two major philosophers of the next generation, Plato and Aristotle. The chapter’s first section shows the debt of early theorizing on constitutions to the Sophists’ practice of antilogia or debate but also to the discussions about democracy that mark Athenian intellectual life in the last decades of the fifth century, and shows how such theorizing provides the springboard for Plato’s pursuit for the best constitution. Its second section focuses on the criticism of law and argues that (despite what continues to be a dominant interpretation in the study of Sophistic thinking) such criticism should not be understood as a threat to morality but rather as constructive reflection on the nature and the limits of legislation.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.

This chapter considers the immediate post-war period and the ways in which representations of the war on stage shifted in relation to changing cultural attitudes in the 1920s and 1930s. It begins with the most well-known play of the period, Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928) and shows how, rather than being unique, Journey’s End was part of a crescendo of works on the subject of war. The chapter argues that during the inter-war period playwrights made repeated attempts to find a stage language with which to speak of the shock of the battlefield, as well as the lasting imprint that it left upon every aspect of society. In examining this, the chapter considered better-known plays by authors including Noël Coward, Galsworthy, Priestly, O’Casey and Maugham alongside equally important works such as Corrie’s In Time o’ Strife: Atkinson’s The Chimney Corner, Smith’s Autumn Crocus, Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement, Box’s Angels at War, Pilcher’s The Searcher, Griffiths’ Tunnel Trench and Berkeley’s The White Chateau. As well as exploring the contribution of female playwrights, the chapter considers questions of class strife, the adaptation of veterans to post-war life, and changing sexual mores.

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.

Jonathan Swift was a High Church clergyman and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland. However, Gulliver displays no Christian devotion. His Christianity is simply assumed in a narrative which presupposes a largely Christian readership. The chapter considers Gulliver’s witness of religious practices in the countries he visits. Gulliver’s Travels is predominantly a secular book, but its philosophical, political, and historical perspectives are refracted through the lens of Swift’s religious confession. In these voyages to remote nations of the world, Gulliver encounters or discusses religio-political issues that were highly controversial back home in Gulliver’s England. The book draws upon religious history and polemic. The satire’s treatment of European religious controversy and its view of human nature attracted charges of blasphemy and irreligion, as had Swift’s earlier satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub.The chapter examines these charges and comments on some modern critical views of the religious implications of Gulliver’s Travels. It indicates some significant parallels between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Thomas More’s Utopians.

“In the early eighteenth century, Britain sought to establish itself as the centre of a global knowledge network and, as part of its imperial ambitions, all of nature was subjected to scientific scrutiny and potential control. Swift’s protagonist Lemuel Gulliver recognises his potential as a broker of knowledge within numerous transnational, transcultural, and trans-species encounters, padding his empirical, observational prose with enumeration and comparison in order to convey information about supposedly faraway lands and peoples. Swift’s vignettes of interspecies or intercultural viewing ironise the colonial contact zone, revealing the partiality, contingency, and relative value of British and European scientific knowledge, and, ultimately, undermining notions of national or racial superiority upon which visions of empire rest. Gulliver’s Travels is itself a remarkable encounter, between literature and science, and the parameters of that engagement are partly defined by the colonial project, with the seemingly objective activity of observation implicated in imperial tyranny and exploitation. In scientific observation, Swift found a discursive mode around which he could structure an entire prose satire whilst also probing its intellectual and moral limits, placing the process of observation itself under satiric scrutiny.”

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was published when the centrism of Cold War liberalism was supplanting the radical, multiethnic working-class collectivism characteristic of the liberal-left Popular Front and New Deal. In 1949, amid sharpening conflicts with the US’s recent ally the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s spatial trope of the “vital center” redefined the US political landscape to situate, as constitutive of a new liberalism, the extremist affirmation of American national values and institutions against conflated radicalisms of right and left. While Invisible Man is often read as aligned with vital center liberalism – and as declaring African American commitment to its ethos – this chapter recovers the more idiosyncratic and radical theorization of power, institutions, and social change in the novel. Like Schlesinger, Ellison uses a spatial trope – the depths or underground – to anchor a political intervention. Motivated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, Ellison uses that trope to critique sociopolitical institutions whose actions betray the underlying egalitarian and collective ideals they proclaim. Ellison applies this critique to Marxian and Black nationalist movements, as well as to mainstream American economic and political institutions, thus crafting a singular reformulation of political radicalism for the postwar era.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

The massive cultural and social changes brought about by World War II and its aftermath enabled what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” This chapter highlights some key novels and literary movements that responded to and helped shape the postwar discourse of sexual freedom. It attends first to battles over literary censorship in the first half of the 1960s, focusing on celebrated obscenity trials of the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs. The chapter then turns to novelistic engagements with queer liberation, discussing the work of James Baldwin, Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, and Leslie Feinberg, among others. Using these literary examples, it demonstrates how tensions between individualism and collectivism that are longstanding in the American political project play out in and are transformed by ideas of sexual liberation.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.