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Chapter 9 - Advertisements and Authorship

from Part III - Reading Gulliver’s Travels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

By
Brean Hammond
Edited by
Daniel Cook  and
Nicholas Seager
Daniel Cook
Affiliation:
University of Dundee
Nicholas Seager
Affiliation:
Keele University
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Summary

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.

Keywords

authorshipadvertisementsfrontispiece portraitsparatextsmendacity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels , pp. 111 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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