Gulliver's Travels Gulliver's Travels Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (which is the full title), is a prose satire by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. He himself claimed that he wrote "Gulliver's Travels" "to vex the world rather than divert it". The book became popular as soon as it was published. Alexander Pope
Gulliver's Travels Daniel Defoe's wildly successful "Robinson Crusoe", "Gulliver's Travels" may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In "The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man", Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous