Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel is probably the most widely read political satire ever.

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         Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel is probably the most widely read political satire ever. On the surface, it appears simple and straightforward, a mere travelogue intended for children, it, proves, upon closer examination, to be a critical and insightful work satirizing the political and social systems of eighteenth-century England.

Gulliver’s Travel is the travel account of a ship surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, who finds himself castaway on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants were just six inches tall and his consequent travels to Brobdingnag-the land of giants, Laputa-the land of mathematics and music and finally to the country of Houyhnhnms-horses with reasoning and rationality, who lived with the brutish Yahoos.

 When we analyse Gulliver’s Travel, we have to keep in mind the period in which Swift wrote it and that the events which occurred then had a profound influence over his work.  Many of the comparisons might not be relevant or hold true today. My analysis throws light on the relevance and reference of his story in the time that it was written.

Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels at a time when Europe was the world’s dominant power, and when England, despite its small size, was a rising power with its formidable navy. England’s imperialism brought it into contact with a wide variety of new animals, plants, places, and things, but the most significantly, encounter with previously unknown people—like the inhabitants of the Americas—with radically different modes of existence.

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 The miniature stature of the Lilliputians and the gigantic inhabitants of Brobdingnag can be interpreted as a physical incarnation of exactly these kinds of cultural differences.

Swift has cleverly used the difference in physical size to demonstrate the radical difference in power between Gulliver and the Lilliputian state. Despite Gulliver’s fear of the Lilliputians’ arrows, he is almost condescending in his willingness to be held prisoner by them. Reducing the scale of life in Lilliput strips human affairs of their self-imposed grandeur. Rank and politics lose their significance. Over time, Gulliver begins to earn the Lilliputians’ trust, but it is ...

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