from Part VI - Social and Intellectual Topics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
Swift was not the first satirist and parodist to explore science and its texts and technologies, but his works demonstrated an acute sophistication in how they assimilated and imaginatively transformed natural knowledge, as often a vehicle as a target of satire, and with a recognition of science’s increasing cultural power. The first section of this chapter reconstructs the sources and systems that influenced Swift’s allusions to contemporary science, and how they shaped his early prose. The second section looks at the influence of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and other scientific and ethnographic writings on the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels.
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