GULLIVER'S TRAVELS Digital Edition

Three hundred years ago, under the cloak of night, a porter delivered a curious manuscript to publisher Benjamin Motte. It bore the name of a surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, who had supposedly spent decades lost at sea and discovered unknown lands and peoples. The book was Gulliver’s Travels, the immortal satire by Jonathan Swift, a ludicrous tale of shipwrecks, giants, talking animals, and floating islands in the sky. On its face, it was a playful travelogue, but underneath, the deranged fantasia attacked the utopian madness of Enlightenment thinking, the brutality and violence of the peak of European colonialism, and the preposterous figure that is modern man himself. Over the course of three centuries, it has earned its troublesome place in the Western canon, where it sits uncomfortably among other works that Swift would likely skewer.