Knowra Gulliver’s Travels Gulliver’s Travels A 1726 prose satire by Jonathan Swift, narrated by Lemuel Gulliver, whose voyages to imaginary societies expose political, scientific, and human folly.
Lilliput : An island nation of tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels, divided by court factions and religious disputes. Its miniature politics satirize party rivalry, religious conflict, and dynastic war.
Satire : A mode of writing that exposes folly or vice through ridicule, irony, or exaggeration. The voyages use comic distortion to criticize politics, science, and human conduct.
Jonathan Swift : An Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman, best known for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. Swift’s political and religious concerns shape the book’s attacks on power and pride.
Human nature : The characteristic capacities, motives, and tendencies attributed to human beings. The Yahoos make the book’s most disturbing claims about appetite, violence, and self-regard.
Brobdingnag : A land of giants in Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver becomes a tiny curiosity at the royal court. The giants’ scale reverses the first voyage and makes human bodies and institutions look absurd.
Dramatic irony : A literary effect in which an audience knows more than a character about a situation. Gulliver often accepts customs that the reader can recognize as objects of Swift’s criticism.
Augustan literature : A period of English literature associated with writers including Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. The book belongs to a culture of learned satire, political controversy, and classical imitation.
Misogyny : Prejudice, contempt, or hostility directed toward women. Gulliver’s comments about women invite scrutiny of the narrator and the satire’s own limits.
Laputa : A flying island in Gulliver’s Travels, inhabited by theorists absorbed in mathematics and abstract speculation. Its rulers embody intellectual abstraction detached from practical life.
Defamiliarization : A technique that presents familiar things in strange ways to renew perception. Changing the scale and customs of society makes familiar institutions newly visible.
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