Jonathan Swift Essays

College

Gulliver's Travels

Johnathan Swift was an expert at satire, using irony and sarcasm as mediums to expose people’s stupidity and foolishness. The main targets of his irony were usually government and society. By writing Gulliver’s Travels in an adventurous style, he...

Gulliver's Travels

Throughout the four parts of Gulliver's Travels, Swift employs the eight types of satire - parody, understatement, invective, irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, inversion/reversal, and wit - to add historical and thematic depth to Lemuel Gulliver's...

Gulliver's Travels

It is human nature to strive for paradise, but is it actually attainable? There have been countless attempts to establish utopian societies, yet ultimately, all have failed. In his work, Gulliver's Travels, Swift recounts the journeys of Gulliver...

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift, an author whose life straddled the turn of the 17th century, is widely considered to be the greatest satirist in British literary history. Although he is well-versed in poetry and has written a prolific amount of private...

Gulliver's Travels

In Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, Swift presents a narrative that aims to continually change his audience's opinion by offering an array of perpetually shifting standpoints. From the start of the journey we see the tale unfold in the same manner...

Gulliver's Travels

J.R.R. Tolkein once said "not all who wander are lost." It is to be assumed, then, he was not talking about Capt. Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is a narrative of the identity crisis. Capt. Gulliver is indeed lost, both...

Gulliver's Travels

How far can an ancient ideal stretch? From Euclidean geometry to Plato’s Republic, ancient ideas are still being analyzed and furthered. One example, the fourth book in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, is directly related to Plato’s ideal state,...

College

Gulliver's Travels

Misanthropic undercurrents have often been detected in Gulliver’s Travels, usually unearthed and expounded in connection to the fourth book of the travelogue. Through Gulliver, the fourth book voices vehement misanthropy, with propounding the...