Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World

About the book

Lemuel Gulliver presents his travels with the practical precision of a man reporting things he has personally seen. The places he visits, however, alter ordinary proportions and assumptions so radically that his explanations of home become strange in their turn. Swift uses changes of scale, unfamiliar customs, and disconcerting comparisons to examine political ambition, intellectual vanity, violence, and pride. The traveller's apparently reasonable voice does not remain a neutral guide; his admiration and disgust also become matters for readers to judge. Each voyage offers inventive incidents while putting pressure on the standards by which civilised behaviour is supposedly recognised. The book's satire grows sharper as curiosity about other societies becomes an uncomfortable question about the society, and the species, to which the observer belongs.

• Pride
• Political satire
• Perspective

Why read it

For the imaginative force with which altered worlds make ordinary claims to reason and civilisation look uncertain.

English text