Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings

Jonathan Swift

Ιουν 2011 · Πωλήθηκε από Bantam Classics

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Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

“It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery,” remarked Alexander Pope when Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726. One of the unique books of world literature, Swift's masterful satire describes the astonishing voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, to surreal kingdoms inhabited by miniature people and giants, quack philosophers and scientists, horses endowed with reason and men who behave like beasts. Written with great wit and invention, Gulliver's Travels is a savage parody on man and his institutions that has captivated readers for nearly three centuries. 

As bestselling author and critic Allan Bloom observed: “Gulliver's Travels is an amazing rhetorical achievement. Swift had not only the judgment with which to arrive at a reasoned view of the world but the fancy by means of which he could re-create that world in a form which teaches where argument fails and which satisfies all while misleading none.”

This representative collection of Swift’s major writings includes the complete Gulliver’s Travels as well as A Tale of a Tub, “The Battle of the Books,” “A Modest Proposal,” “An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,” “The Bickerstaff Papers,” and many more of his brilliantly satirical works. Here too are selections from Swift’s poetry and portions of his Journal to Stella. Swift’s savage ridicule, corrosive wit, and sparkling humor are fully displayed in this comprehensive collection.

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Jonathan Swift was born in 1667, the son of Anglo-Irish parents. After an education in Ireland, Swift moved to England where he reluctantly chose a career in the church. There, he worked for Sir William Temple, in whose household he met Esther Johnson. The two fell in love, but were never publicly married. While in England, Swift discovered his talents as a satirist, producing texts such as "A Tale Of A Tub" and "The Battle of the Books" (1704). At age thirty-one, Swift returned to Ireland as chaplain to a lord justice. Swift maintained his energy and wit and, later in life, wrote "A Modest Proposal" (1729) and GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1726). Swift died on October 19, 1745.