...n GULLIVER’S TRAVEL AS A POLITICAL SATIRE Gulliver’s Travel is widely known for Swift’s severe attack and satire on politics during his time and beyond. Swift had a close connection to politicians and their tactics because he worked as the Chief Publicity Agent and Adviser to the Tory ministry of Harley and St. John. He found politics as a very hateful job. He saw the vanity, pride and absurd whims of the monarchs, the stupidity of the aristocrats, plotting of the courtiers and corruptions of the politicians. And he decided to satirize all these in his Gulliver’s Travel. Politics among the Lilliputians: In the land of the Lilliputians, Swift mocks all the intrigues and treachery of the courts in England. The emperor of the Lilliputians represents George I, the Emperor of England who had an insatiable desire for conquest.The Lilliputians are English men reduced in stature.Their vices have been magnified and exposed.Blefusco is France.Gulliver is a gigantic St.John who has done much for the country but suffers for the treachery and ingratitude of the King and his ministers.The queen represents Queen Anne.Flimnap represents Walpole.The Prime Minister of Lilliput was a fine rope dancer represents The Prime minister of England who was a slippery opportunist.Swift satirises the absurd ambition of the Lilliputian King who considered himself the terror of the Universe.After Gulliver had destroyed the navy of Blefusco the Emperor wanted him to crush that country completely: “So...
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...Swift intended Gulliver’s Travels to be a polemical act against the Whig Government and a satire on contemporary European civilization and perennial imperfections, follies and vices of humanity. It is said to combine topical and general satiric meanings, written in a general way so the reader can apply the topical meanings intended. Gulliver’s Travels is a masterfully disguised satire so it was hard for the Whig government to convict the author for treason or libel. Swift’s words and opinions come from the mouth of fictional characters in a vague or an ironic manner. His meanings are hid well enough in the text that the government could not convict him and the readers could read the aesthetics of the book with their own interpretations. According to the law at the time, an author could not be prosecuted if he used uncertain innuendos and fictional characters in attacking people, institutions or government, if the victim was not specifically named or identified by unambiguous evidence from the text, even though it might be obvious to readers, who was being satirized. Even though Gulliver’s Travels is ironic and a satire, Swift often lets Gulliver report what he sees and not cast a judgement. The Lilliputians are thus described by many of their good qualities. He lists many of the Lilliputian laws and customs that have good points, even though they are often contrary to those of England. Swift uses this to his advantage by pointing out the shortcomings of European society by contrasting...
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...Satirical Devices in Chapter 4 of Gulliver's Travels When you read Gulliver's Travels in the light of it being a satire, the stories are still humorous, but you realize that Swift was making a public statement about the affairs of England and of the human race as a whole. In the 4th chapter of the first part of this novel, we can find many rhetorical devices that prove that this work is a satirical novel. The first voyage captures the reader's attention on the way that Swift uses to apply to the real world a new scale, of much lower dimensions. This scale forces us to see this fictional world in a telescopically way. All this is an example of exaggeration and fantasy that is used in so many times during this novel. At the same time, Swift uses this new scale to convert physical smallness in moral smallness so making these topics smaller, Swift makes them look grotesque and insignificant, although at that time they were of vital importance. In this book, Swift by describing the ridiculous system of Lilliput's government, is satirizing the English system of government. He uses parallelisms that seem absurd at first glance but make more sense when you look at them carefully. We can see some details on the Lilliputian life which are references to political and religious life of Swift's time. There is a clear parallelism between the two worlds: this tiny world and Swift's world, which is an example of wit. Besides, It is not difficult to see that the two Parties fighting under the...
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...In Swift’s excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver's association with Glumdalclitch and the ruler build up a topic of conquering dread.Gulliver develops a fear of the extremely large bees that swarmed around him, and the Queen’s eating habits were so disturbing that they frightened him. However, Glumdalclitch helped him while he was in their world, she gave him a place to stay and she cared for him. Without her he wouldn’t have survived living in the world. The enormous bees scared Gulliver in several ways. In paragraph 4 Gulliver says, “I sat down at my table to eat a piece of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps allured by the smell, they came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes.” “They flew...
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...Swift uses each of the four voyages in Gulliver's Travels to expose and excoriate some aspect of human folly. In Gulliver's first voyage, in which he visits Lilliput, Swift uses the events in the story to make severe criticisms of England between reigns of Queen Anne and George the first. It is a commentary on the moral state of England. In Gulliver's next voyage, we find him in Brobdingnag. His voyage here shows us the filthy mental and physical characteristics of man. In this voyage Swift criticizes the moral and physical corruption of man. Gulliver's third voyage, to the floating island of Laputa is one of the most satirical of the whole book. In this voyage Swift criticizes the Royal Society of England, in which he says is composed of useless philosophers, inventors, and scientists. Gulliver’s final voyage, he finds himself in the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Swift use this voyage to expand his satire to the evils of the entire human race. In the end Gulliver's dilemma is also humanity's. Developing greater virtue can lead to hating humanity's corrupt nature, but trying to escape one's own human nature because of its corruption is insanity. In Gulliver’s travels, Jonathan Swift travels to four different foreign countries, each representing a corrupt part of England. Swift criticizes the corruption of these parts, and focuses on the government, society, science, religion, and man. Not only does swift criticize the customs of each country, he mocks the naive...
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...Some would argue that Swift was a misanthrope and thatGulliver's Travels proves his hatred of mankind. Agree or disagree with this assessment and support your opinion with examples from the text. Jonathan Swift is undoubtedly is a great artist. He had to face unreasonable and prejudiced criticism in the hands of his contemporaries because he had unveiled the brutality of man which was hidden under the mask of humanism. Swift’s age was full of vices of corruption but still the people were satisfied. Swift gives us a true picture of the man of that age in “Gulliver’s Travels”. In the last voyage, his satire becomes very bitter when he presents horses more reasonable than man. Swift is notorious for being Misanthropist in the last part of the “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift has to face the allegation of being misanthropist for during whole of his life. It is because the critics attributed Gulliver’s blunders to Swift. But, he makes his aim in “Gulliver’s Travels” clear in his letter to Alexander Pope. He says, “The chief end of all my labour is to vex the world, rather than divert it”. Secondly, he declares that “He has ever hated all the nations, professions and communities and all his love for individuals.” He hates men but loves man. He hates the animal like vices in man; the crown of creation. He was shocked to see the follies of men of his age and didn’t consider this reasonable. But, this does not mean that he hates mankind, as he writes to Pope, “I tell you after...
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...Carolina Alarcón Marín Utopia and Dystopia in: “Gulliver’s Travels” Book 4 by Jonathan Swift “That Nation which he describes as the Seat of Virtue, and its Inhabitants as Models to all (he the lays) World reputed of his for no own Justice, and better Brain; than and Truth, are mere the Cleanliness, Fictions Temperance, Wisdom, Houyhnhms and Yahoos deemed to have no more Existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia”.1 In the voyage to the country of the Houyhnhms, portrays a society in which the qualities of the Jonathan Swift characters are remarkable and in a way impossible, in other words these astounding moral and intellectual characteristics create a sense of a utopian society in the mind of the reader, especially when comparing it to the real world and the real social schemes in which we live on. Swift’s satire in Houyhnhmland may be seen as a Utopia, but the incredible yet awkward behaviour of these creatures is completely unnatural, and therefore it creates a dystopia. This utopia is believed to be plausible because of the accumulation of details the writer provides, enveloping the reader and blurring the limits between reality and imagination that have been imbedded in our minds through the socialization process. “...He looked upon us as a sort of animals to whose share he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural 1 Williams, Kathleen, editor. ”Anonymous...
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...Patrick’s. During his brief time in England, Swift had become friends with writers such as Alexander Pope, and during a meeting of their literary club, the Martinus Scriblerus Club, they decided to write satires of modern learning. The third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels is assembled from the work Swift did during this time. However, the final work was not completed until 1726, and the narrative of the third voyage was actually the last one completed. After his return to Ireland, Swift became a staunch supporter of the Irish against English attempts to weaken their economy and political power, writing pamphlets such as the satirical A Modest Proposal, in which he suggests that the Irish problems of famine and overpopulation could be easily solved by having the babies of poor Irish subjects sold as delicacies to feed the rich. Gulliver’s Travels was a controversial work when it was first published in 1726. In fact, it was not until almost ten years after its first printing that the book appeared with the entire text that Swift had originally intended it to have. Ever since, editors have excised many of the passages, particularly the more caustic ones dealing with bodily functions. Even without those passages, however, Gulliver’s Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical, constantly attacking British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries. Late in life, Swift seemed to many observers to become even more...
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...Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift I/ Introduction A. Writer: Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift is the greatest satirist in the history of English literature. He was the contemporary of Steele, Addison, Defoe and other English enlightens of the early period; however he stood apart from them. The greatest satirist in the history of English of the bourgeois life came to the negation of the bourgeois society. Swift's art had a great effect on the further development of English and European literature. The main features of his artistic method, such as hyperbole, grotesque, generalization, irony, were widely used by the English novelist, the dramatists, by the French writers, by the Russian writers and others. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 30, 1667. He studied theology at Trinity College at the age of fourteen and graduated in 1688. He became the secretary of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party, at the age of 21. At Moor Park, Sir William’s estate, Swift made friend with Hester Johnson, the daughter of one of Temple’s servants. His letters to her, written in 1710 – 1713, were later published in the form of a book under the title of Journal to Stella, the name he poetically called Hester. In 1692, Swift took his Master of Arts Degree at Oxford University. In 1694, he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on A Tale of a Tub, which supports the position of the Anglican...
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...differences should be encouraged and protected is currently embraced by many Western political thinkers. The twenty-first century is an era of unprecedented globalization and cultural diffusion. However, the mingling of different cultures is often followed by disastrous consequences as seen in the turbulent political situation in Germany (Siebold, Reuters UK). Although Jonathan Swift wrote his travel satire Gulliver’s Travels in an age when multicultural societies had yet to emerge (indeed, cultural imperialism was the zeitgeist of the eighteenth century, an idea quite antithetical to multiculturalism), the cultural clash that Swift’s protagonist Lemuel Gulliver experiences with the foreign peoples he comes into contact with and observes between individuals within these societies portend the divisive aspects of human nature that preempt the possibility of a multiculturalist ideal. Gulliver is not a detached observer: his interactions with these societies eventually lead to his disillusionment about the goodness of humankind and destroy his own identity as an Englishman and a human being. Gulliver’s Travels echoes the...
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...In the excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels, author Jonathan Swift utilizes literary examples and the emotions of the characters to develop a theme of overcoming fear. When creating this theme, Swift creates two examples of overcoming fear with the characters’ emotions. Firstly, he uses the idea of the fear of the unknown, with the interactions between Gulliver and the giants that he meets, as well as the giants’ reaction to Gulliver himself. Secondly, he uses the idea of the fear of the other, in Gulliver’s responses to the behavior of the giants and the altercation with the wasps. Both of these examples lay singularly but also intertwine to create the prevalent theme within the passage of overcoming fear. The fear of the unknown is demonstrated...
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...earliest novels. In this novel Waugh presents a humorous and satirical view on Fleet Street journalists and their frenzied hunt of a scoop. Other novels, such as ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift and ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell, both portray satirical messages throughout. In ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Swift satirises human nature, and the political system and government. He uses Gulliver as a satirical device, and in order to portray the sarcasm and over-exaggeration of what Swift is satirising, he sends Gulliver on three journeys to strange lands, where he encounters odd people and thing, more tools that Swift uses. Gulliver's first journey takes him to the Land of Lilliput, where the local inhabitants of the land are six inch tall beings and he is a giant. His next journey brings him to Brobdingnag, where his situation is reversed, and he is a midget among giants. His third journey leads him to Laputa, a floating island which is inhabited by strange beings who derive their whole culture from music and mathematics. And finally Gulliver's fourth journey places him in the land of the Houyhnhnm, a society of intelligent, reasoning horses. By creating these four mysterious, ridiculous yet rather amusing journeys, Swift is able to add irony and satire of the English political system and the human ways. In Gulliver’s first journey for example, he gets ship-wrecked and swims ashore. When he wakes up, he finds himself tied to the ground by tiny people. Swift uses this to satirise...
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...manner, the society turns to its judicial system, which lays down the rules of how to go about the case and determine the punishment. There were many different societies that enforced a law system according to their needs and population, and this goes the same for the era. Ben Jonson and Jonathan Swift are two very popular and well respected authors of satire, who have made stories that made society question the judicial system that they carried. Ben Jonson satirizes the judicial system in his play Volpone, a story of an old but sneaky man who manipulated people into giving him things for the possibility of becoming the heir of his grand fortune. Jonathan Swift mocks the way England is carried out politically in Gulliver’s Travels, the story of Lemuel Gulliver who travels by sea to four different lands and learns of their habits whilst comparing them to England and opening his eyes to the flaws of England. One of the most crucial points in the story of Volpone would be the case of Bonario and Celia, who are being falsely accused by Corvino, Voltore and Corbaccio, who are currently competing for the position of becoming Volpone’s heir. Jonson mocks the system by simply giving full control to the men of power and portraying the avocatores as very gullible men. Before entering the court, the men agree to lie about the case in order to ensure a successful outcome to the trial of Celia and Bonario in the beginning of Act 4, scene 4 “Well, now you know the carriage of the business...
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...Caroline Lumb The name Columbia for "America" (in the sense of "European colonies in the New World") first appeared in 1738[1][2] in the weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of Parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput, and fictitious names were used for most individuals and placenames found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names; some few were taken directly from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from Eboracum, the Roman name for York), and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".[3] The name appears to have been coined by Samuel Johnson, thought have been the author of an introductory essay (in which "Columbia" already appears) which explained the conceit of substituting "Lilliputian" for English names; Johnson also wrote down the Debates from 1740 to 1743. The name continued to appear in The Gentleman's Magazine until December 1746. Columbia is an obvious calque on America, substituting the base of the surname of the discoverer Christopher Columbus for the base of the given name of the somewhat less well-known Americus Vespucius. As the debates of Parliament...
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...Cool ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij ij The terms "satire" and "parody" are often confused, but the purpose of satire makes it generally very different from parody. When people do a parody of something, they may rely on many of the same techniques that a satirist would use, including exaggeration, but their primary purpose is to make people laugh, and if the author doesn’t really care if there is a real political effect or not The terms "satire" and "parody" are often confused, but the purpose of satire makes it generally very different from parody. When people do a parody of something, they may rely on many of the same techniques that a satirist would use, including exaggeration, but their primary purpose is to make people laugh, and if the author doesn’t really care if there is a real political effect or not. Some The terms "satire" and "parody" are often confused, but the purpose of satire makes it generally very different from parody. When people do a parody of something, they may rely on many of the same techniques that a satirist would use, including exaggeration, but their primary purpose is to make people laugh, and if the author doesn’t really care if there is a real pol The terms "satire" and "parody" are often confused, but the purpose of satire makes it generally very different from parody. When people do a parody of something, they may rely on many of the same techniques that a satirist would use, including exaggeration, but their...
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