Review by Choice Review
Gulliver's Travels is often read by undergraduates, but how well is it really understood? Knowles renders Swift's masterpiece more intellectually accessible than ever. This volume includes a chronology of Swift's life and works and a neatly organized and briefly annotated bibliography. More important, the first three chapters furnish all the necessary nuts and bolts of the genres of travel literature and satire. These chapters hold the study together and at the same time sustain the author's contention that "Gulliver's Travels is a carefully calculated synthesis of many kinds of literature." Knowles analyzes this Swiftian synthesis in chapters four through ten. He makes clear the meanings and inconsistencies of Gulliver's visits to Lilliput and Brobdingnag and helps the reader differentiate Gulliver from Swift. The complex layerings of politics and philosophy with satire are neatly unraveled in chapters on the voyages to Laputa and Houyhnhnmland. With its brisk and urbane prose and teacherly mode, this volume is ideal for undergraduates needing to situate the masterwork of an allusive and, as Knowles maintains, quite "vexing" writer of politics and satire. All undergraduate collections. S. Pathak Virginia Commonwealth University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
