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Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
by: Jonathan Swift

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.5
EAN: 9780141439495
ISBN: 0141439491
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: February 25, 2003
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Sales Rank: 10348
Studio: Penguin Classics

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.

Edited with an Introduction by Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Profound, if you allow it...
I recently took a graduate course in topics of Modern philosophy and we read this book in great detail. I must disagree with those reveiwers who approach this book from a literary or English studies background and classify the book as satire. A very powerful case can be made that this book is highly philosophical. Swift even goes so far as to have Gulliver say that his log concerning his travels (i.e. the book) is directed to philosophers. Even had he not, one cannot overlook that Aristotle and Plato make their appearances (by name!) in the text.

What Swift is up to in Gulliver's Travels is a critique of Modern philosophy in so much as it diverges from Ancient philosophy. That is to say that the substance of the book examines the so-called "Ancients versus the Moderns" question. What Gulliver is ultimately doing is bound up with the image of the divided line and the allegory of the cave from Plato's ... Read More

Rating:

- Gulliver's Travel is the greatest satire in the English language
Satire is a staple of comedy shows on cable tv. However, the greatest satirist of the English language is not to be found in hilarious monologues on television. His name is Jonathan Swift. Swift was an Irish born bishop from Dublin who lived from 1667 to 1775. In his greatest piece of fiction "Gulliver's Travels" we see him as he punctures human prejudice, hatred, warfare and petty political bloviating!
The story is told through the pen of Dr. Lemuel Gulliver who is a ship's surgeon. Gulliver is gullible! Like Voltaire's Candide he learns through his outlandish travels the fraility of the human species.
Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput where the people are no more than six inches tall. He is a sense of wonder to the little people having never seen a person who is so tall. The islanders call him
Quinbus Flestrin or Great Man Mountain. Gulliver puts out a fire in the palace of the ... Read More

Rating:

- Good read, a little dated
I really enjoyed reading through Gulliver's Travels, I recommend it to anybody who's trying to get a good grasp on the classics and learn to enjoy some literature, but for those of you who just want to sit down at the beach and relax, this might not be the book for you. Despite the numerous versions of Gulliver's Travels flying around billed as Adventure Stories, you must remember that Swift was a satirist and Gulliver's travels is really just a large allegory. Keep in mind it's a satire from a few hundred years ago. You may find yourself lost in names and connections that would have been obvious (and perhaps very clever) to the original audience but keeps the modern day reader flipping through to the foot and end notes. The most interesting parts are the first, second and fourth parts, while the third gets a little dry. When he gets into the narrative of the story, it is very interesting and again a very important piece ... Read More

Rating:

- Interesting
Gulliver's Travels is definetely an interesting read. The changes pace frequently because the book is divided into four books according to his different adventures. Each book(adventure)gives you a differnt view of people and questions about humans and humanity. The last book was my personal favorite-it's a very differnet spin on humanity from the other ones. Overall, it's a very good book and I would recommend it if you need a book to read or have only ever read the children's version.

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