Twentieth Century Interpretations Of Gulliver S Travels

A collection of critical essays and commentary on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels.

This book, part of a lengthy series, is a collection of essays that examine the structure and meanings in Gulliver's Travels.

Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, Revised Edition profiles the censorship of many such essential works of literature. The entries new to this edition include extensive coverage of the Harry Potter series, which has been frequently banned in the United States on the grounds that it promotes witchcraft, as well as entries on two popular textbook series, The Witches by Roald Dahl, Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, and more. Also included are updates to such entries as The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

Gulliver's Travels explores the human need to create order out of chaos through an internal system of knowledge that affirms the subjective self. In this study, I examine how Gulliver integrates elements of knowledge from the native and the host-societies into an operative system of self-knowledge. Gulliver's self-knowledge threatens the status quo within these societies by placing him at the solipsistic center of the narrative, orchestrating his observations to maintain the subjective self. If Gulliver was successfully indoctrinated in England, then why does he exhibit such an imperfect understanding of the complexities that define the principles which shaped Western society? Furthermore, if Gulliver is brainwashed by his hosts, then by what authority does he continually transgress the rules of law that govern their societies? Specifically, why does he knowingly commit acts of disobedience and heresy if he has been successfully indoctrinated into their social systems? My study concludes Gulliver's empirical search for an answer to the question Who am I? fails because he is unable to harmonize subjective truths within the objective world.

Using Dostoevsky's most radical experiment in literary form as a springboard, Gary Saul Morson examines a number of key topics in contemporary literary theory, including the nature of literary genres and their relation to interpretation. He convincingly argues that genre is not a property of texts alone but arises from the interaction between texts and readers. Observing that changing conventions of interpretation and classifciation may alter the perception of particular works, Morson considers a number of problematic texts that have been read according to two contradictory sets of conventions - "boundary works"--And a futher group of texts - "threshold works" such as Dostoevsky's Diary of a writer - that were evidently designed by their authors to exploit this kind of hermeneutic ambivalence. Morson explores the nature of the literary utopia and its parodic form, the anti-utopia, and, returning to Dostoevsky's Diary as his example, a third form which exists as a sort of open dialogue of utopia and anti-utopia

Presents a collection of essays analyzing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels, including a chronology of the author's works and life.

The definitive guide to Swift's controversial satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, demonstrating its complexity and enduring legacy.