Gulliver's Travels and its contexts

Overview

This module combines close reading of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) with an examination of the various ways in which the text has been and can be contextualised. The ‘contexts’ of the module title thus refer to those of:

- Swift’s career as a poet, essayist, and satiric writer

- the social and political contexts of the fiction’s first composition and printing (1725-1726)

- the book as a speculative fiction

- the literary-critical / theoretical approaches of feminism and theories of gender, the body and sexuality; post-colonialism; critical race theory; and eco-criticism

- adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels (children’s literature, film, graphic novel, painting, illustration, cartoon)

- twenty-first-century resonances

The module thus develops close, formal analysis of the narrative alongside wider contextual, conceptual and theoretical understandings of the book and its place in the world of Swift and of its subsequent histories. The module has an important historicising impulse, as we consider the diverse contexts of 1726 in which the book was initially received; but it also analyses modern responses to the novel through indicative and exemplary critical readings. Finally, the module considers the contemporary resonances of Gulliver’s Travels.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module students will be able:

- to demonstrate critical understanding of a range of texts authored by Swift (from 1690s-1740s), principally his long-form fiction, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

- to engage with significant conceptual, political, historical and philosophical contexts for the study of Swift’s writing.

- to analyse the principal ideas and critical strategies of a range of literary and critical work.

Skills

Advanced critical writing and oral skills

Ability to comprehend and debate a range of theoretical and conceptual positions

Ability to relate historical, political, philosophical and theoretical contexts to the study of literature.

Assessment