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Satirical description of the vices of English society in the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift

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Theme: Satirical description of the vices of English society in the novel “Gulli ver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift Contents Chapter I. The writer and his epoch. 1.1 Brief outline of XVIII th century English literature. 1.2 Jonathan Swift – a great satirist of Enlightenment. 1.3 Artistic qualities of Jonathan Swift’s works Chapter II. Criticism of society in the novel “Gulliver’s travels”. 2.1. Swift as a satirist. 2.2. Exposing the ills of contemporary society. Conclusion The list of used literature. 2

Introduction Under the guidance of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, special attention is paid to the formation of harmoniously developed, highly educated, modern thinking generation, able to take responsibility for the fate of the Homeland. Therefore, the task of education, the task of rising up a new generation who is capable of national renaissance will remain the prerogative of the state and constitute a priority. At present great importance is attached to the study and teaching of foreign languages. The resolution of the President of Uzbekistan “On measures to further improvement of the system of foreign languages teaching” dated from 10 December 2012, the resolution of the Ministers’ Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan “About the Affirmation of the Education Standards on Foreign Lang

Actuality of the theme. The eighteenth century gave the world such brilliant English writers as Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and famous dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The theme of the qualification work deals with the creative career of a famous English writer Jonathan Swift. Special attention has been paid on the satirical depiction of the vices of society in the novel “Gulliver’s travels”. The eighteenth century in England became a period of satire, poetry, drama, essays, and criticism. All took on the satirical manner at the hands of of such writers as Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope and Fielding. Enlightenment was a great age of prose. The audacious prose satires of Swift were among the glories of the age. S

 To make a survey of literary criticism connected to the theme.  To analyze authentic literature and make conclusions; Object of research: A remarkable novel of Jonathan Swift “Gulliver’s Travels” is the object of the qualification work. It is analyzed taking into account critical view points. Scientific novelty and practical value. A famous English author J.Swift is considered the master of satire in English literature in the eighteenth century. He has all the gifts of the supreme story teller. Although it passed a long period after his death his novels are widely read and enjoyed throughout the world, they have become a significant part of the prose genre. The themes of his works are universal. They reflect universal values, such as self- sacrifice, honor and compassion which are chara

Chapter I. The writer and his epoch. 1.1 Brief outline of XVIII th century English literature. The eighteenth-century philosophical impulse known as the Enlightenment rested on five general beliefs: the inevitability of progress; the perfectibility of man and his institutions; the efficacy of reason; the beneficence of God; and the plentitude and perfection of nature. It stressed the primacy of science over theology, skepticism over authority, reason over faith. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were convinced that it was within man’s capacity, by applying reason to his problems, to discover those great laws by which all human and natural activity could be explained. Possessing such knowledge, men could then direct their efforts toward building a society in which progress was certain a

Eighteenth-century literature reflects the ideas and interests of the Age of Reason, the Age of Classicism, the Age of Elegance. Works show a sense of order and moderation; writers display their “wit”, or cleverness. Prose is calm and logical; poems are carefully structured. In the eighteenth century the subjects of study to which man apllied himself became more numerous and more systematic, and it was the good fortune of England that prose in that age had become a pliant and serviceable medium. It was a century full of speculation and fierce questioning, a century with powerful minds that applied themselves to the problems of the nature of life, and set out solutions, which have been the basis of much later through. It was a century, above all others, when England led Europe in philosophi

c) Literature became instructive. The writers dealt with problems of good and evil. They tried to teach their readers what was good and what was bad from their own point of view. In the 18th century Britain was as powerful as France. This resulted from the growth of its industries and from the wealth of its large new trading empire. Britain had the strongest navy in the world, the navy controlled Britain's own trade routes and endangered those of its enemies. Britain became wealthy thanks to trade. This wealth made possible both an agricultural and an industrial revolution which made Britain the most advanced economy in the world. However, there was an enormous price to pay, because while a few people became richer, many others lost their land, their homes and their way of life. Famili

From now on the two-party political system came into being. (It was later adopted in America).The Whigs represented the financial interests, the cities and towns, the progressive-element, and were against any interference of the monarchy, in politics. The Tories, many of them Jacobites, represented the country squires, and their folk, those who favoured old traditions. The 18th century could also be called a century of wars. From the beginning to the end of the century the great rival, the enemy was France. At first the struggle was for European supremacy, but by the middle of the century the struggle with France was for overseas empire. Here Britain had an advantage because she had the better navy and knew how to use her sea-power. It was during these years that the huge British Empire, r

of elegance". Real civilization, superior to the old classical civilization of Greece and Rome, to which the 18th century compared itself, had been achieved at last. Now society (persons of position, wealth and influence) could enjoy it. At the beginning of this period literature was chiefly created for this small society of important and influential people. It was a public literature, which represented the outlook and values of this limited society. It did not represent the impressions, hopes or fears of one individual. It was literature that could be read aloud in a drawing-room, enjoyed in a theatre or discussed in a coffee-house. It seems quite natural, that the atmosphere of this kind encouraged comedy, satire in verse and prose, pleasant little essays, and criticism, but it did n

classic style was Alexander Pope. Alongside with this high style there appeared new prose literature, the essays of Steele and Addison and the first realistic novels written by Defoe and Swift. Most of the writers of this time wrote political pamphlets, but the best came from the pens of Defoe and Swift. The second period of the Enlightenment was the most mature period: the forties and the fifties of the 18th century. It saw the development of the realistic social novel represented by Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. The third period refers to the last decades of the century. It is marked by the appearance of the new trend: Sentimentalism. The representatives of this trend were Goldsmith and Sterne. This period also saw the rise of the realistic drama (Sheridan) and the revival of po

Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton are frequently mentioned as the progenitors of the Enlightenment. In the later phase of the English Renaissance, Bacon composed philosophical treatises which would form the basis of the modern scientific method. Bacon was also a logician, pointing out the false pathways down which human reason often strays. He was also an early proponent of state funding for scientific inquiry. Whereas Bacon worked in the realm of ideas and language, Isaac Newton was a pure scientist in the modern sense. Like Galileo, he relied on observation and testing to determine the soundness of his theories. He was a firm believer in the importance of data, and had no philosophical qualms regarding the reliability of the senses. Newton’s Principia, completed in 1687, is the foundation

outlets for pent-up frustrations, not signs of internal weakness. Argumentation as a style of decision-making grew out of the new scientific method, which invited multiple hypotheses to be put to the test. Empiricism, or the reliance on observable, demonstrable facts, was likewise elevated to the level of public discourse. During the Renaissance, there was certainly unbridled optimism, and a sense of humanity’s great unfulfilled potential. The Enlightenment was believed to be the realization of the tools and strategies necessary to achieve that potential. The Renaissance was the seed, while the Enlightenment was the blossom. The idea of a “public,” an informed collection of citizens invested in the common good and preservation of the state, reached fruition during the Enlightenment. Curiou

for information, gossip, and entertainment. Some coffee houses and salons appealed to more lowbrow tastes, and these were sometimes the target of authorities. Personal libraries were still expensive, but they were becoming more common. The trend of solitary reading, initiated during the Renaissance, continued unabated throughout the Enlightenment. The first modern lending libraries began to dot the provincial capitals of Europe, with the trend eventually reaching America as well. A literate public was a more opinionated public, and so more equipped to engage in the political discourse. Probably some of the elites looked upon the new reading public with disdain. However, the days of literature as a sacred and guarded realm open only to a few were all but gone by the time the nineteenth cent

was an innovator on several fronts. For one, he popularized the heroic couplet, a sophisticated rhyme scheme that suited his subject matter well. He took mundane settings and events and made them grandiose, a kind of irony that anticipated Modernism by two centuries. He blended formal criticism into his poetry, a diffusion of generic boundaries that also strikes one as an entirely modern practice. In his own day, Pope was possibly most admired for his capable and effective translations of classic literature. He single-handedly elevated translation to an art-form, and demonstrated that a good poetic sensibility was necessary to pull it off with any success. Pope’s great masterpiece was The Dunciad, a four-part, scathing indictment of eighteenth century English society. Although he initial

public consequence. He saw the need for becoming independent of the British Empire, but he also foresaw the difficulties in forging a strong and lasting union out of disparate and competing colonial interests. His contributions at the Constitutional Conventions were indispensible, and needless to say informed by the principles of rational thinking and the observable facts of the matter. The essential beliefs and convictions of Enlightenment thinkers were by and large committed to writing, thus a fairly accurate sketch of the eighteenth century mind is available to historians working in this century. The principles set forth during the Enlightenment had consequences in the near term that very few anticipated, and these would spell the end of the so-called Age of Reason. If there is a histor

suddenly literate public, clamoring for reading material. The next several decades would be spent figuring that out. Despite its apparent failures and setbacks, the Enlightenment paved the way for the modern world. 1.2 Jonathan Swift - a great satirist of Enlightenment. Irish author and satirist Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland on November 30, 1667. His father, an attorney, also named Jonathan Swift, died just two months before he arrived. Without steady income, his mother struggled to provide for her newborn. Moreover, Swift was a sickly child. It was later discovered that he suffered from Meniere's Disease, a condition of the inner ear that leaves the afflicted nauseous and hard of hearing. In an effort to give her son the best upbringing possible, Swift's mother gave h

Swift's father joined his older brother, Godwin, in the practice of law in Ireland. He died in Dublin about seven months before he his namesake was born. He died of syphilis, which he claimed he got from dirty sheets when out of town. At the age of one, child Jonathan was taken by his wet nurse to her hometown of Whitehaven, England. He claimed that there he learned to read the Bible. His nurse returned him to his mother, still in Ireland, when he was three. His mother returned to England after his birth, leaving him in the care of his Uncle Godwin, a close friend and confidant of Sir John Temple whose son later employed Swift as his secretary. Swift's family had several interesting literary connections. His grandmother Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift was the niece of Sir Erasmu

Swift was studying for his master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham . Temple was an English diplomat who arranged the Triple Alliance of 1668 . He had retired from public service to his country estate to tend his gardens and write his memoirs. Gaining his employer's confidence, Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance". Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments. Swift took up his residence at Moor

return to Ireland if she refused. She presumably refused, because Swift left his post and returned to England and Temple's service at Moor Park in 1696, and he remained there until Temple's death. There he was employed in helping to prepare Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time, Swift wrote The Battle of the Books , a satire responding to critics of Temple's Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), though Battle was not published until 1704. Temple died on 27 January 1699.Swift, normally a harsh judge of human nature, said that all that was good and amiable in mankind had died with Temple.He stayed on briefly in England to complete editing Temple's memoirs, and perhaps in the hope that recognition of his work might earn hi

At age 14, Swift commenced his undergraduate studies at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1686, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, and went on to pursue a master's. Not long into his research, huge unrest broke out in Ireland. The king of Ireland, England and Scotland was soon to be overthrown. What became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 spurred Swift to move to England and start anew. His mother found a secretary position for him under the revered English statesman, Sir William Temple. For 10 years, Swift worked in Surrey's Moor Park and acted as an assistant to Temple, helping him with political errands, and also in the researching and publishing of his own essays and memoirs. Temple was impressed by Swift's abilities and after a time, entrusted him with sensitiv

prose satire and composed, mostly at Moor Park between 1696 and 1699, A Tale of a Tub , one of his major works. Published anonymously in 1704, this work was made up of three associated pieces: the Tale itself, a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning”; the mock-heroic “Battle of the Books”; and the “Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” which ridiculed the manner of worship and preaching of religious enthusiasts at that period. In the “Battle of the Books,” Swift supports the ancients in the longstanding dispute about the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature and culture . But A Tale of a Tub is the most impressive of the three compositions . This work is outstanding for its exuberance of satir

political essays; A Tale of a Tub; and certain impish works, including the “Bickerstaff” pamphlets of 1708–09, which put an end to the career of John Partridge, a popular astrologer, by first prophesying his death and then describing it in circumstantial detail. Like all Swift’s satirical works, these pamphlets were published anonymously and were exercises in impersonation. Their supposed author was “Isaac Bickerstaff.” For many of the first readers, the very authorship of the satires was a matter for puzzle and speculation. Swift’s works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers led by Joseph Addison , but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education, and political principle, but he was also passionately loyal

Swift quickly became the Tories’ chief pamphleteer and political writer and, by the end of October 1710, had taken over the Tory journal, The Examiner, which he continued to edit until June 14, 1711. He then began preparing a pamphlet in support of the Tory drive for peace with France. This, The Conduct of the Allies , appeared on Nov. 27, 1711, some weeks before the motion in favour of a peace was finally carried in Parliament. Swift was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his appointment as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. With the death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the accession of George I , the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he was to pass most of the remainder of his l

or 1701. It has sometimes been asserted that Stella and Swift were secretly married in 1716, but they did not live together, and there is no evidence to support this story. It was friendship that Swift always expressed in speaking of Stella, not romantic love. In addition to the letters that make up his Journal to Stella, he wrote verses to her, including a series of wry and touching poems titled On Stella’s Birthday. The question may be asked, was this friendship strained as a result of the appearance in his life of another woman, Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he named Vanessa (and who also appeared in his poetry)? He had met Vanessa during his London visit of 1707–09, and in 1714 she had, despite all his admonitions , insisted on following him to Ireland. Her letters to Swift revea

secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley. After making the long journey to the Earl's estate, Swift was informed the position had been filled. Discouraged but resourceful, he leaned on his priestly qualifications and found work ministering to a pea-sized congregation just 20 miles outside of Dublin. For the next 10 years, he gardened, preached and worked on the house provided to him by the church. He also returned to writing. His first political pamphlet was titled A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome.In 1704, Swift anonymously released A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Tub, although widely popular with the masses, was harshly disapproved of by the Church of England. Ostensibly, it criticized religion, but Swift meant it as a parody of p

more simply, as Gulliver's Travels. The book was an immediate success, and hasn't been out of print since its first run. Interestingly, much of the storyline points to historical events that Swift had lived through years prior, during intense political turmoil.Not long after the celebration of this work, Swift's longtime love, Esther Johnson, fell ill. She died in January 1728. Her life's end moved Swift to write The Death of Mrs. Johnson. Shortly after her death, a stream of Swift's other friends also died, including John Gay and John Arbuthnot. Swift, always bolstered by the people around him, was now quite troubled.The closing years of Swift’s life have been the subject of some misrepresentation, and stories have been told of his ungovernable temper and lack of s

instructions to make no alterations whatsoever. However, the sons soon find that their coats have fallen out of current fashion, and begin to look for loopholes in their father's will that will let them make the needed alterations. As each finds his own means of getting around their father's admonition, they struggle with each other for power and dominance. Inserted into this story, in alternating chapters, the narrator includes a series of whimsical "digressions" on various subjects. In 1690, Sir William Temple , Swift's patron, published An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning a defence of classical writing (see Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns ), holding up the Epistles of Phalaris as an example. William Wotton responded to Temple with Refl

accusations. In "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739) Swift recalled this as one of his best achievements. Gulliver's Travels , a large portion of which Swift wrote at Woodbrook House in County Laois, was published in 1726. It is regarded as his masterpiece. As with his other writings, the Travels was published under a pseudonym, the fictional Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon and later a sea captain. Some of the correspondence between printer Benj. Motte and Gulliver's also-fictional cousin negotiating the book's publication has survived. Though it has often been mistakenly thought of and published in bowdlerised form as a children's book, it is a great and sophisticated satire of human nature based on Swift's experience of his times. Gulliver

factions...teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants....Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice. During his visits to England in these years, Swift published A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704) and began to gain a reputation as a writer. This led to close, lifelong friendships with Alexander Pope , John Gay , and John Arbuthnot , forming the core of the Martinus Scriblerus Club (founded in 1713). Swift became increasingly active politically in these years. From 1707 to 1709 and again in 1710, Swift was in London unsuccessfully urging upon the Whig admi

Also during these years in London, Swift became acquainted with the Vanhomrigh family (Dutch merchants who had settled in Ireland, then moved to London) and became involved with one of the daughters, Esther . Swift furnished Esther with the nickname " Vanessa " (derived by adding "Essa", a pet form of Esther, to the "Van" of her surname, Vanhomrigh), and she features as one of the main characters in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. The poem and their correspondence suggest that Esther was infatuated with Swift, and that he may have reciprocated her affections, only to regret this and then try to break off the relationship. Esther followed Swift to Ireland in 1714, and settled at her old family home, Celbridge Abbey. Their uneasy relationship continued for some

Chapter II. Criticism of society in the novel “Gulliver’s travels”. 2.1. Swift as a satirist. Satire. A work or manner that blends a censorious attitude with humor and wit for improving human institutions or humanity. Satirists attempt through laughter not so much to tear down as to inspire a remodeling. If attackers simply abuse, they are writing invective; if they are personal and splenetic, they are writing sarcasm; if they are sad and morose over the state of society, they are writing irony or jeremiad. As a rule modern satire spaces the individual and follows Addison’s self-imposed rule: to “pass over a single foe to charge whole armies.” Most often, satire deals with great sinners and criminals than with the general run of fools, knaves, ninnies, oafs, codgers, and frauds. Indeed, a

amusingly attacked the British in his “Battle of the Kegs” (1778). Freneau (The British Prison Ship) wrote the strongest Revolutionary satire. Shortly after the Revolution, the Anarchiad, by Trumbull, Barlow, Humphreys, and Hopkins, and Modern Chivalry (fiction), by Brackendrige, attacked domestic political difficulties and the crudities of our frontier. Irving’s good-humored satire in The Sketch Book and Knickerbocker’s History, Holmes’s society verse, Lowell’s dialect poems (Biglow Papers), and Mark Twain’s prose represent the general trend of American satire up to the twentieth century. In the twentieth century such British writers as G.B.Shaw, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, and Aldous Huxley have maintained the satiric spirit in the face of the gravity of naturalism and the earnestness of

Plowman, Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Butler’s Hudibras, Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” and Lowell’s A Fable for Critics. Almost from its origins, however, the drama has been suited to the satiric spirit, and from Aristophanes to Shaw and Noel Coward, it has commented with penetrating irony on human foibles. There was a notable concentration of its attention on Horatian satire in the comedy of manners of the Restoration Age. But it has been in the fictional narrative, particularly the novel, that satire has found its chief modern vehicle. Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift, Fielding, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, John P. Marquand, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon all have made extended fictional narratives the vehicle

contemporary events — political events in England, which he satirized in the Lilliputian episode in Gulliver, or socio-economic events in Ireland, which he satirized in "A Modest Proposal." Swift died a great, a famous, and an enormously respected man, though his last years were melancholy ones and though he lapsed, finally, into senility. His literary influence on subsequent authors has been incalculable. His values, however were those of his age, and the Romantics and the Victorians reacted against his work even more strongly than they did against Pope's. Pope they merely relegated to the dust-bin, but they perceived Swift, particularly the Swift who had brought Gulliver to the Country of the Houhynhynms, as a threat, and they savaged him. Thomas De Quincey wrote in 1847 that

In our own century he has been analysed and reinterpreted, but though the old slanders continued to plague his memory — D. H. Lawrence refered in 1929 to his "insolent and sicklily squeamish mind" — he has regained his place as one of the great English authors, and certainly as the greatest satirist in the English language. Yeats helped us to begin to appreciate his poetry once more; he was a strong influence on Joyce; and T. S. Eliot could write, in 1923, in an essay on Joyce's Ulysses, that Swift's vision of the country of the Houhynhynms was "one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever achieved." 2.2 Exposing the ills of contemporary society. Gulliver's Travels derived much of its popularity from the contemporary readers' enthusiastic co

telescope. Having no sea shown on them, and cut off at the base, they in fact look as if they’re flying through the air. When Laputa flies over Balnibarbi, Swift literalizes the comic potential of the travel narrative and its illustrative apparatus. Gulliver's Travels was unique in its day; it was not written to woo or entertain. It was an indictment, and it was most popular among those who were indicted — that is, politicians, scientists, philosophers, and Englishmen in general. Swift was roasting people, and they were eager for the banquet. Swift himself admitted to wanting to "vex" the world with his satire, and it is certainly in his tone, more than anything else, that one most feels his intentions. Besides the coarse language and bawdy scenes, probably the most important

from their parents and given to the State to rear. In an earlier satire (A Modest Proposal), he had proposed that the very poor in Ireland sell their children to the English as gourmet food. Swift is also a name-caller. Mankind, as he has a Brobdingnagian remark, is "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift also inserted subtly hidden puns into some of his name-calling techniques. The island of Laputa, the island of pseudo-science, is literally (in Spanish) the land of "the whore." Science, which learned people of his generation were venerating as a goddess, Swift labeled a whore, and devoted a whole hook to illustrating the ridiculous behavior of her converts. In addition, Swift mocks blind

those of their adversaries, the Moderns. In Gulliver's last adventure, Swift again pointed to the ideal of the mean by positioning Gulliver between symbols of sterile reason and symbols of gross sensuality. To Swift, Man is a mixture of sense and nonsense; he had accomplished much but had fallen far short of what he could have been and what he could have done. Swift was certainly not one of the optimists typical of his century. He did not believe that the Age of Science was the triumph that a great majority of his countrymen believed it to be. Science and reason needed limits, and they needed a good measure of humanism. They did not require absolute devotion. Swift was a highly moral man and was shocked by his contemporaries' easy conversion to reason as the be-all and end-all of p

political solution. It is this moral dimension, this focus on humankinds universal propensity to delude itself, that is the main appeal of the work for subsequent generations of readers, for whom the machinations of eighteenth century Westminster politicians mean very little. Swift deliberately sets up Gullivers voyages in a realistic voyage framework. He provides maps of the voyages, complete with decorative, tiny, spouting whale drawings just like real maps. He also mixes actual places (Japan and Sumatra) with the imaginary. Gullivers level of pride is fairly stable in part 1, where he has the physical and moral advantage over the tiny Lilliputians. In part 2, however, he reveals himself to be suffering from their destructive, hubristic attitude. Having boasted of the political and socia

 the publication history of the work reveals the extent to which Swift lost control of the production over the Travels: the first edition of the Travels was heavily and illicitly doctored by its printer.  the author's obsessive harping on the idea of veracity, verisimilitude, and authenticity that characterises Gulliver’s account Gulliver's Travels began life not as the work of a single man, but as a group project. The idea originated with the Scriblerus Club, a group including Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthno. The Scriblerus Club was a group of writers and wits devoted to satirising what they perceived as the folly of modern scholarship and science. They invented an author and pedant called MartinusScriblerus, and wrote an imaginary biography of him, which was

allies impeached by the Whigs. Gulliver's Travels was in part a virulent attack on the Whig ministry that Swift blamed for these circumstances. Swift saw the book as politically explosive, and therefore as something that he had to present and position quite carefully in order to avoid prosecution. He secretly sent the manuscript to a publisher, Benjamin Motte. Accompanying the manuscript was a letter asking Motte if he would publish Gulliver's Travels signed by Gulliver's imaginary cousin, Richard Sympson. Sympson is the author of the prefatory letter to Gulliver's Travels. So already there is a distinct blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction: in his real life dealings with his publisher, Swift hides behind a fictional figure that later appears within

So here already we have a rather strange set of relationships established between Swift and the authorship of Gulliver's Travels. First the book starts out as the product of several minds, a group project. Then it becomes Swift's own, but one from which he distances himself by pretending that its really by its fictional narrator, Gulliver, and brought to the publisher by Gulliver's fictional cousin, Sympson. Then the book is published, and rather than getting Swift’s own version of Gulliver's Travels, the London literati get a version bowdlerised by the publisher. Nonetheless, it is a hit, and Swift revels in the success of 'his' book; yet he continues to pretend that it's not 'really' by him. By 1726, the notion of authorship of Gulliver's Tra

perhaps I should be hardly believed; at least a severe Critick would be apt to think I enlarged a little, as Travellers are often suspected to do…'. This emphasis on the trueness of the account presented works in part as a parody of emergent traditions in contemporary prose and prose fiction. Those of you who’ve read any of Daniel Defoe's fictions will know that they are always prefaced with professions of authenticity. Moll Flanders begins: 'The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine'. Defoe is attempting to define the veracity of his account in opposition to the fictionality of contemporary romance fiction. But the narrators of romance fiction also stressed that their accounts were genui

genre to its limit, by attempting to pass off as private history an account that is palpably fantastical. Another important aspect of the travel narrative satirised by Gulliver's Travels is its function as a form of reflection on contemporary European society. Travelogue's observations about new nations and experiences could be used to interrogate domestic culture and mores, not always to their advantage. And this aspect of the growing interest in the new world that wasn't just confined to travel- writing. Contemporaries were fascinated by the possibility that a savage could be noble, revealing by contrast the corruption of a 'civilised' voyager (Consider AphraBehn'sOroonoko). Gulliver's progressive disillusionment with his own society, and his preference fo

politicians, and academics. Like all allegories, these mock-traveller's tales gesture towards the true state of things by telling a lie, or in the Hounynyms' phrase, 'telling the thing that is not'. So Gulliver's Travels is a fictional tale masquerading as a true story, yet the very fictionality of the account enables Swift author to reveal what it would not be possible to articulate through a genuine account of the nation. Allegory and Meaning. Allegory provides an interpretative framework within which a 'true' set of values or ideas can be communicated, as one narrative gestures toward another which is not directly perceivable or communicable. Allegory does this via a series of equations or equivalences. For example, in A Tale of a Tub, Martin equals Ang

But at different points Gulliver serves as a cipher for other historical figures. For example, at one point he comes to stand in as a figure for Swift's friend, the disgraced Tory leader Lord Bolingbroke. When Gulliver is arrested by the Lilliputians and forced to stand trial, Gulliver decides to escape rather than testify. Justifying this apparently cowardly decision, he says: 'Having in my Life perused many State-Tryals, which I ever observed to terminate as the Judges thought fit to direct; I durst not rely on so dangerous a Decision, in so critical a Juncture, and against such Powerful Enemies'. Here Swift, via Gulliver, offers a defence of Bolingbroke's decision not to stand trial over his part in the Jacobite Atterbury plot of April 1722. We read, in this context, Gul

afforded by our unreliable narrator are almost dizzying, and they make it hard to establish a sense of proportion. This confusion of perspective, and sense of the difficulty in establishing relative values is something that is reflected in Gulliver's own difficulties in measuring what he sees around him. For example, in 'Voyage to Brobdignag', he writes: 'I was an Hour walking to the end of this Field; which was fenced in with a Hedge of at least one hundred and twenty Foot high, and the Trees so lofty that I could make no Computation of their Altitude'. When Gulliver arrives back home again, his sense of perspective, of what is the norm, has so altered that he is flummoxed by the size of the members of his family: 'My Wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower

system of knowledge. What we know then, is derived from connections made between perceived experiences – not from any innate wisdom or understanding. Locke's theory provoked a debate about what was real. His idea of the materialism of objects external to the body seemed opposed to any sense of inner reality. In Locke's philosophy of knowledge, reason is elevated above spiritual revelation. For a staunch Anglican like Swift, it seemed to offer a defence or intellectual basis for deism, or atheism. Although Locke's Essay was initially intended to provide an investigation of the nature of religious belief, many Anglicans thought Locke was creating an epistemology that cut God out of the equation. We could read Gulliver's troubles in understanding what he sees as a parody of Lo

But the philosophy he arrives at by the end of the book is one which is profoundly misanthropic and patently ridiculous: when he returns home after his voyage to the Hounynyms, he has concluded that he wants to live with horses, and make canoes out of humans. Swift offers us a mind which has indeed been imprinted with what it experiences from the senses, but which is unable to configure these experiences into a useful and meaningful worldview. The ultimate result of all Gulliver's experiences is a profound disorientation: because he has no innate sense of himself and his own values, he merely tries to internalise the perceptions and value systems of the cultures that he finds himself in, none of which quite match with his own needs. While evaluating Gulliver's final philosophy, it

Conclusion Having analyzed the problem of satiric description of the vices of the English society in the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift we came to the following conclusions: In “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift criticized and satirized the evils of the society in the form of fictitious travels. Apart from being a good story, it is the indictment of the human race for refusing reason and benevolence as the ways of life. The scenes and nations described in the book are so extraordinary and amusing, that the novel still arouses interest with both children and adults. It covers the adventures of a ship surgeon who is washed up on a number of imaginary shores. The novel is divided into four parts that are actually four voyages. Thus in each country Gulliver makes observations about socie

John Ruskin named him as one of the three people in history who were the most influential for him. George Orwell named him as one of the writers he most admired, despite disagreeing with him on almost every moral and political issue. Modernist poet Edith Sitwell wrote a fictional biography of Swift, titled I Live Under a Black Sun and published in 1937. Swift crater , a crater on Mars 's moon Deimos, is named after Jonathan Swift, who predicted the existence of the moons of Mars . In honour of Swift's long-time residence in Trim , there are several monuments in the town marking his legacy. Most notable is Swift's Street, named after him. Trim also holds a recurring festival in honour of Swift, called the 'Trim Swift Festival'. Jake Arnott fea

Used literature 1. Allen W. The English Novel., London, 1958. 2. Arnold I.V., Dyakonova N.Ya., Three Centuries of English Prose, Leningrad, 1967. 3. Arnold I.V., Dyakonova N.Ya., Three Centuries of English Poetry. Leningrad,1967. 4. Chase E.M. Jewett A., Evans W. Values in Literature. Boston ., 1965. 5. Dyakonova N.Ya. An Anthology of English Literature. St.Peterburg,1978. 6. Elliott R.C., The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, 1960. 7. Heath-Stubbs John, The Verse Satire, 1969. 8. Holman Hugh. Harmon W. A. Handbook to Literature. London , 1992 9. Ивашева В.В. Английская литература XX века. М, Просвещение, 1979. 10. Kettle A. An Introduction to the English Novel. London, 1957. 11. Kearns G. English and Western Literature. USA Macmillan Publ., 1987. 12. Kernan Alvin, The Cankered Muse: Sa

3. Swift Jonathan. Battle of the Books. London, 2002. Web sites. 1. http://www.ziyonet.uz / 2. http:// www.mail.ru / 3. http:// www.rambler.ru / 4. http:// www.education.uk.org/ 5. http:// www.yandex.com / 6. http://www.englishliterature.com/ 7. http://www.searhenglish.britishcouncil.org/ 8. http://www.onlineenglishliterature.com 54

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