Bitterness and humor, dogmatism and tolerance, unprofessional negligence and scholarly care characterize recent criticism of Swift's "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms." Many scholars have based their conclusions on the findings of earlier commentators rather than on Swift's work itself. Others have imposed a system of their own upon the fourth voyage, sometimes without regard for incontrovertible evidence against their views. Consequently, these scholars often reveal more about themselves than about Swift and his work. Although only a few really new ideas have been presented since 1958 which help to explain the Dean's motivation and intentions, a number of new interpretations of the fourth voyage of Gulliver's Travels clarify some of Swift's purposes. Generally, recent critics can be divided into three groups: those who believe that the Houyhnhnms are Swift's moral ideal for mankind; those who contend that the Houyhnhnms are not Swift's moral ideal; and those who suggest that Swift's moral ideal for man lay somewhere between the Houyhnhnm and the Yahoo.

This study examines and also evaluates the literary sources of Gulliver's Travels.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

The aim of this thesis is to understand the presentations of characters¡¦ identity problems in Jonathan Swift¡¦s Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Daniel Defoe¡¦s Robinson Crusoe in relation to their respective genre and to see how the presentations reflect the social ambience and the cultural development in eighteenth-century England. This thesis consists of five chapters. In chapter one, I will briefly summarize the social conditions in eighteenth-century England. This summary of social conditions will show eighteenth-century England as a society of conflicts and contrasts between old and new values. Two key words here, old and new values, will allude to the development of literary genres in eighteenth-century England. Novel is a term which first appears around this time in the history of literary writing and which refers to a new type of genre. As people have varieties of life styles, so do authors have a new genre to work with. However, this newness, either in a social or cultural context, coexists with the old values. In the context of literary writing, the novel, as a genre, has to compete and cooperate with one of its precursors, the genre of satire. In chapter two, I will try to understand the relationship between novel and satire in the light of another genre, utopia. Even though the utopian element in satire is a counterpoint, meaning the dystopian stance, of utopian traditions, there still is a strong sense of community in satirical writings. Compared with satire, the sense of individuals is the core of the genre of the novel. Realism, marked by Ian Watt, is a new trend in novel writing and it is highly connected with the idea of individualism instead of the sense of community. In order to see this difference, Swift¡¦s Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Defoe¡¦s Robinson Crusoe are the two texts that I will use in chapter three and four for detailed discussions. As for the second part of chapter two, I try to single out the idea of travel with the intention to see its importance in eighteen-century England. In chapters three and four, my concern turns to characters¡¦ identity problems in the two travel narratives: Gulliver¡¦s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Compared with each other, the characters of the two travel narratives have different identity problems and this difference is important in the way of symbolizing the different concerns of each genre: satire for a sense of community and novel for individualism. Moreover, in terms of the different endings in the two travel narratives, Gulliver and Crusoe¡¦s experiences of their identity problems also suggest an important social condition, which is the different possibilities of life, in eighteenth-century England. In conclusion, I will give an overall review of the whole thesis.

This thesis argues that all subjects are constructed through discourse or ideology and are incapable of acting or thinking outside the limits of that discursive or ideological construction. Based on Louis Althusser¡¦s theory, ¡§individuals are always-already subjects,¡¨ living in ¡§the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.¡¨ This Marxist notion serves as the point of departure for the thesis, which defines a subject¡¦s imaginary relation to the world. For Defoe and Swift, their ideological subjection to ¡§the system of the ideas and representations¡¨ is presented in their narratives, which relate the respective subject¡¦s imagination to the world in the eighteenth century. The first chapter begins with Ian Watt¡¦s critique of the eighteenth century individualism, which demands domestic alienation. It argues that if Gulliver¡¦s misanthropy loses its moral dimension, his domestic alienation is questionable. As Gulliver¡¦s counterpart, Crusoe bases his autonomy upon nonreciprocal human relationships, and his self-claimed omnipotence, under constant threats, is false and illusory. The second chapter modifies Helene Moglen¡¦s dualistic interpretation of Crusoe¡¦s consciousness and analyzes his internal contradictions from the perspective of Hegelian dialectics. The course of establishing the colonial hierarchy in Robinson Crusoe further exposes the dialectical reality of colonial tension and contradiction, which also lends itself to interpreting the triangular relationships among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver, and the Yahoos in Gulliver¡¦s Travels. In the third chapter, the focus of concern shifts to the representation of sexual other. Though Roxana and Moll are constructed to emulate Crusoe and embody the female versions of economic autonomy, these two female-based narratives, Roxana and Moll Flanders, bring to light the paradoxes of eighteenth-century male subjectivity that discriminates men from women in terms of domesticity and individualism. While Roxana is further commodified to be enlisted in the service of imperialist ideology to mask the reality of colonial aggression and imperialist expansion, the same sleight of substitution also underlies Swift¡¦s systematic attacks on women in his Irish Tracts and misogynist poems. Lastly, the fourth chapter aims to bring these two categories of difference together. Through Swift¡¦s and Defoe¡¦s imagination, the racial other and their sexual counterpart enter into a metaphorical alliance. Thus Defoe¡¦s Amazon and Swift¡¦s Yahoo trope not only synthesize what are considered two discrete and separate categories of discrimination, but also demonstrate that their creations of race and gender derive from the same source of reference.

No description available.

Douglas Adams and Jonathan Swift are satirists who lived and worked 250 years apart. Swift's eighteenth-century text, Gulliver's Travels, tells the story of an Englishman's adventures during numerous sea voyages that bring him into contact with fantastical peoples and places. Adams's twentieth-century text, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, relates a hapless Englishman's trials and tribulations during an intergalactic voyage which takes him and his companions to bizarre destinations. This study considers key similarities and differences between the texts. Resonances between Gulliver's celestial navigation in the eighteenth century and Arthur Dent's navigation among those very heavenly bodies in the twentieth century are explored. The novels are examined for evidence of satire, the travel genre, proto science fiction and mock science fiction and for generic similarities between the works. Through a process of elimination, Gulliver's and Arthur Dent's respective journeys are abstracted, summarised and represented graphically. Communication theory and linguistic trends during the Enlightenment and the twentieth century, as well as the science and technology of each era are also briefly reviewed. This study finds that, through the exploitation of the journey as literary device which allows Gulliver and Arthur Dent to view England and Earth from different places and from different times, both Swift and Adams are able to comment on and satirise humankind. The illustrations of the journeys highlight the differences between the two novels in terms of structure and adherence to markers of time and place. Lemuel Gulliver's journeys are shown to be radial voyages with England as the core location of departures and arrivals, whereas Arthur's appear to be random and follow neither the expected and known rules of travel, nor the laws of time and space. The study furthermore considers the nature of the locations visited and finds resemblances and differences between the authors' and readers' known worlds, and the fictitious worlds described. This naturally leads to a consideration of the degree of alienation experienced by the protagonists and, indeed, humanity. Finally, the texts are examined for communication problems faced by the protagonists. The conclusion of this study suggests that in Gulliver's Travels and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy both Adams and Swift show their awareness that language is not neutral, and that it possesses the power to entertain, inform, deceive and destroy. Both texts function metonymically to highlight the perilous complexity of the human condition and show that humanity's journey through space/time in the twentieth century remains as treacherous as one by sea during the Enlightenment. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / English / MA / Unrestricted

Any work of art, by definition, is so designated because it speaks to all generations, irrespective of time or place, and regardless of artistic, political, economic, or ideological fads. To accept a work as art with anything less than these universalities is blind acceptance and pure idolatry. Each generation must determine the validity of the label art by determining the relevance of the work to its own generations. Unless a work of art can successfully meet such a test, the label is no more than a gentleman's agreement among self-designated arbiters of taste. Two recent critics, writing on the philosophy of literary criticism, have defined what is perhaps the best test which a work of art must meet. Both agree that a work of art must go beyond the contemporary concern of the author. Swift’s “controversies,” particularly his famous indictment of men, have neve lapsed into memories, for the assertions Johnathan Swift makes about man in Gulliver’s fourth voyage are incontrovertible. And were it not so, his indictment of man is a valid one. Hopefully, however -- and Swift held out such hope -- the course of human history may be altered.

My study utilizes ecocriticism, eco-Marxism, and posthumanism to discover how the sympathetic practices of both reading and ecology provide us with what I call an oiko-logic. Specifically, I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing. In Gulliver’s Travels we see Gulliver as an ecological threat in every journey, and Swift says that this is because we forget ourselves and deliberately choose to not attune—sometimes even choosing destruction. For Swift, we bungle things no matter which system we try, and we create degenerative devolution despite the fact that we can help. Sterne’s fundamental ecological question is how people and the entities they dwell with (living and non-living) have real interactions—which means considering domestication’s bilateralism. Humans and animals can interact beneficently in Sterne’s work, and individualism becomes oiko-logically untenable since calculations of value and affordability must include others. In Moby-Dick the whale’s values are more moral than Ahab’s, and through comparisons available in the text of Moby-Dick we begin to see inside Melville’s eco-values to the impact of a heroic animal agency as Moby-Dick follows his values—while our conscience hangs in crooked corridors. In Butcher’s Crossing and representations of buffalo slaughter, correlative human-animal experiences of thirst, ferality, and slaughter are contrasted with western bison hunters on the plains and aliens in such a way that the alien is between humanity and itself. In oiko-logic, literature and ecology share a sympathetic practice similar to the Native American sensibility of Mitakuye Oyasin: “all my relations.”

This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text