Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Seager, N

Abstract

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) bears an uneasy relationship to the novel genre as this has been constructed in post-WWII criticism in terms of realism, coherent subjectivity, and middle-class values. Formally and ideologically, Gulliver resists the cultural energies that impelled the nascent novel, satirizing the taste for mimetic narratives of compelling individuals cultivated by Robinson Crusoe. This chapter addresses the ways in which an “anti-novel” paradoxically advanced the art of extended prose narrative.

• Publication Date: 2022-02
• Deposit Date: May 31, 2023
• Pages: 175--192
• Book Title: Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
• ISBN: 3110649764, 9783110650440
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110650440-010
• Publisher URL: https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110650440/html?lang=en