Gulliver's Travels

Historical materials, annotation, and a new introduction make this iconic but challenging text accessible to students.
In this narrative of the gullible ship's doctor Lemuel Gulliver and his extraordinary travels, Jonathan Swift takes readers through a series of apparently child-like fantasy worlds of tiny people and giants, floating islands and talking horses. But through this fantastic journey, he also gave to literature an enduring model of mankind's follies, vulnerabilities, vanities, and self-destructiveness. Dangerously topical in its own time and much debated ever since, Gulliver's Travels is among those works of English literature that entrap and challenge readers in every period.This edition uses the 1735 edition as the copy text, retaining the original, unmodernized text. Historical appendices provide a context for the novel's literary models, scientific influences, and complex political and religious allusions.