Shipwrecked and adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes on Lilliput, an island inhabited by tiny people whose height renders their political quarrels ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) somehow managed to balance his role as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin with being one of the most effective, disgusted and ferocious satirists in the English language. Gulliver's Travels is both a parody of what Swift viewed as the ridiculously contrived exotic travel genre pioneered by writers such as Captain William Dampier and an incomparably vivid and funny narrative that lies at the very heart of early English fiction.
