Gulliver travels to four extraordinary places. In the first, people are five or six inches tall, in the second, sixty or seventy feet. The third is a kind of satellite inhabited by absurdly impractical scientists, and the foruth is a country gouverned by horses who treat humans as filthy animals. By turns exciting and comic, Gulliver's fantastic aduventures were read, in the words of Gay, ‘fom the cabinet-counecil to the Nursery’,as a travel book and as a powerful satire on human nature. The text is based on that of 1735, incorporatinbg revisions by Swift of the first edition. 作者简介: JONATHAN SWIFT(1667-1745) was born of English parents in Dublin, where he was educated at Trinity College, and in 1713became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral. While previously living in London, he had made friends with Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, formed with them the Scriblerus Club, and written propaganda for the Tory administration of another club member, Robert Harley. He had first made his mard as a satirist with A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704), and after his return to Dublin(1714)he used his genius for polemical satire to defend Ireland(i.e. Anglo Irish Protestants) against exploitation by the English Whigs, most sensationally in S Modest Proposal(1729). Politics figured in Gulliver's Travelsalso, but only as a single element in a story of universal appeal, full of humour and excitement. Witten when Swift was nearly 60, and first published in 1726,it at ince became, puite literally, one of the worle's chassics. |
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