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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - Critical Reception

  • from Part IV - Afterlives
  • Edited by Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Nicholas Seager, Keele University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>
    Published online:
    05 October 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023, pp 179-191

  • Summary

    We have been reading Gulliver’s Travels for nearly 300 years, and we have been arguing about it just as long. The history of the critical reception of Swift’s masterpiece begins as soon as the book was published, when Swift was charged with indecency and misanthropy, though he has always had defenders as well as detractors, a situation that continued into the nineteenth century. In the Victorian period, Gulliver was often sanitised through abridgement, especially in versions for children. In the twentieth century, Gulliver’s Travels has been the subject of numerous lines of academic enquiry, including criticism that focuses on its sources and generic identity; on its employment of rhetoric and irony in service of satire; on feminism and sexuality; on colonialism and politics; and on the histories of science, philosophy, and religion.