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from Part III - Reading Gulliver’s Travels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2023
A Voyage to Lilliput lays the ground for a number of satirical techniques that continue throughout Gulliver’s Travels: selective use of detail; topical allusions to real people and events; an unreliable narrator; competing claims of the abstract (language, human ideals) and the concrete (the human body, the physical world); reversals; and manipulation of size and perspective. Lilliput, where everything shrinks by a scale of 12 to 1, has proven to be the most beguiling fantasy among the satiric fictions in Gulliver’s Travels that ultimately entrap Swift’s readers in painful truths. This chapter discusses the narrative style that readers encounter at the start of Gulliver’s Travels; the political parallels between Lilliput and England; the play on perspective and expectations; and Swift’s interest in the volatility, manipulability, and power of language.
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