Baroque & Neoclassical · Novel · 1726

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

A ship’s surgeon visits Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms. Each island is a mirror that refuses to flatter the species.

Satirical voyage

Characters

Narrator whose common sense slowly curdles into misanthropy.

Rational horses who expose human ‘Yahoo’ nature by contrast.

Enlightenment confidence is put to sea and comes back seasick.

Size, science, and species keep rewriting what looks normal.

Travel literature turned inside out as moral experiment.

Scale makes flesh grotesque and politics suddenly visible.