Indeed, Swift protested that he would sooner "vex the world . . . than divert it." From the moment of its publication in 1726,
Gulliver's Travels has done both, charming generations of readers and inspiring more adaptations, answers, and illustrations than any other work of Augustan literature. It has also kindled almost continuous critical debate as to the precise objects of its satire, its moral tendency, and its ultimate significance.
Between 1945 and 1985 nearly five hundred books and articles were devoted to Gulliver's Travels, and this critical tide runs on unabated. How to classify a work that has variously been regarded as a children's tale, a fantastic voyage, a moral allegory, and even as a novel is a question that has consistently vexed Swift scholars. For while Gulliver's Travels is generally conceded to be the finest prose satire in English, it also stands as one of the most popular works of eighteenthcentury fiction, one that has traditionally been linked with Robinson Crusoe (1719) for its creation of verisimilitude and its mastery of circumstantial detail. Although written before the full efflorescence of the English novel in the 1740s, Gulliver's Travels nonetheless bears a close (albeit idiosyncratic) relationship to that tradition of formal realism exemplified in the works of Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe.
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