Episode 11: Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) may indeed be the “goofiest book that was ever written,” which is why it’s so fun to talk about! We get into all the nitty-gritty of Jonathan Swift’s scathing, sprawling, scatalogical satire -- its historical contexts, its politics that range from pretty good (empire is bad!) to terrible (it thinks women’s bodies are gross), and how its horses seem like they’re probably murderous eugenicists.

Also, just FYI for a certain kind of tankie -- satire need not be some self-indulgent bourgeois form of nonpolitics.

We read the Oxford edition edited by Claude Rawson with explanatory notes by Ian Higgins. For a transhistorical study that situates the concepts Gulliver is working through in the long history of European empire, we recommend Rawson’s God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945.

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