POLITICAL SATIRE IN GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

This is a literary essay that investigates satire as it can be found in Gulliver's Travels. It does this through an in-depth analysis of two extracts from the novel that looks at how the various elements of satire and manifested in the extracts and to what end the author uses them.

Swiftian Inspirations: The Legacy of Jonathan Swift from the Enlightenment to the Age of Post-Truth. Edited by Jonathan McCreedy, Vesselin M. Budakov and Alexandra K. Glavanakova, 2020

This research paper aims to explore some common examples of Seventeenth and Eighteenth century British satire as presented in John Wilmot’s poem “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind” (1679) and Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels (1726/1735) and essay “A Modest Proposal” (1729). It is well known that the political, religious and scientific turmoil of the time had a great impact on the production of this derisive literary genre as there was a general sense of disillusionment with humanity as a species. Yet, contrary to the popular use of satire, two other notable figures, William Shakespeare and John Donne, have used satire for more joyous subject matters. William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” (1609) and “Sonnet 131” (1609) and John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” (1633) all employ satire as a tool of praise instead.

Gulliver seemed unremarkable, but diligent readers were quite eager to believe what he told them. The customary introduction of Gulliver's Travels of Lilliput enticed the readers into taking the hero and his judgment of his early career at face value. Swift almost makes us believe that Gulliver kept a diary of his activities. This would have preserved the spontaneity and surprise of each encounter, just like it was done in other travelogues and adventure tales of the era. Swift is conveying what he believed to be the most important form of truth, moral truth about human nature and human history, for which the fiction provides a vehicle, says Robert P. Fitzgerald1 ironically but just as but just as assertively. Swift acknowledged that he intended for his satire to "vex" the world, and it is undoubtedly in his tone that one can most clearly detect his aims. The most significant aspect that Dr. Bowdler brought up was probably not the foul language or the pornographic scenes2 but the sarcastic tone of Gulliver's Travels was altered from the original. The original's tone swings from mild comedy to outright disdain, but there is always some element of satire present. Dr. Bowdler made it into a children's picture book by removing the irony.

Satire- analyzed by studying three works: Candide(Voltaire), Huckleberry Finn(Mark Twain) and Gulliver's Travels(Jonathan Swift). What do these three renowned authors have in common? Satirical (and accurate) criticism of their respective societies.

Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 2022

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. Satire and war have a longstanding literal and metaphoric relationship. Satire has long been the medium to criticize war, while also being figured itself as literary ‘warfare.’ This essay examines the interplay between war and satire in two early modern English prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Thomas Dekker’s Worke for Armorours (1609). Both writers contributed satirical works to literary ‘wars’ of the period, but this essay moves away from their literary feuds and argues that Nashe and Dekker’s prose employ sites of war as settings for social satire and to explore how war, like satire, functions a force that disrupts as a means to correct social abuses.

The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500-1820, 2017

Nowhere was this opposition between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to confront and subvert authority and iniquity but also to solidify communities of readers more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the Golden Age of English Satire. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a secondary philosophical dispute also opened up about the nature and function of laughter. This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. In addition, recent work in the psychology of humour suggests that comic literature and laughter tend to induce in readers forms of cognitive disengagement that categorically prohibit goal-oriented behaviour and the reformation of vice. How, then, was this amalgam of satire and laughter supposed to work? In an attempt to make sense of the functions of satire, I turn in closing to perhaps the most suspicious critic of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift. I turn to him not merely as a coyly sneering satirist, but as, perhaps paradoxically, one of satire’s most optimistic practitioners. Swift was the one figure who suggested with caution, self-mockery and a hint of hope that satire might offer correction, if however indirectly. It did so not by eliciting readers’ laughter and by building coalitions of self-satisfied ethical agreement and critical censure that in turn reformed victims and readers. Instead, satire was most effective when most difficult – when it challenged readers directly. His goal was not to ‘divert’ the world, as he explained to Pope, but to ‘vex’ it, to force readers to re-evaluate the received wisdom by which we all live.

2018

This study objectives were to find out the influence of the England political history and how Swift used the symbol of satire to criticize political situation. Qualitative method with descriptive approach was used in this study. Techniques for collecting the data were done through following: reading and observing the novel of Gulliver’s Travels, scanning and finding the information of some history of English Literature books and history books, and looking for the information related to the study of the literary theory books to get theories and references as supporting research in this study. M.H. Abrams Theory was used in finding and analyzing this study. The result of the study showed that satire was used by Swift to criticize political and social situation. It was reflected in the story of Gulliver’s Travels. For example, Swift criticize the British government by using the Lilliputians.