Gulliver's Travels

Book excerpt: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is one of the greatest satirical works ever written. Through the misadventures of Lemuel Gulliver, his hopelessly "modern" protagonist, Swift exposes many of the follies of the English Enlightenment, from its worship of science to its neglect of traditional philosophy and theology. In Swift's eighteenth century, as in our twenty-first, a war being fought between the "ancients"and the "moderns", between those rooted in the traditions of the West and those seeking to uproot tradition to make way for dangerous and ultimatcly destructive new ideas. Swift's satire on the threats posed by the Enlightenment and the embryonic spirit of secular fundamentalism makes Gulliver's Travels priceless reading for today's defenders of tradition. Yet Swift's subtlety has bemused many modern critics, with the lamentable of result that this classic of western civilization is often misread and misunderstood. This new critical edition, edited by Dutton kearney of Aquinas College in Nashville, contains detailed notes to the text, bringing it to life for today's reader, and a selection of tradition-oriented essays by some of the finest contemporay Swift scholars. The Ignatius Critical Editions Series represents a tradition-oriented approach to reading the Classics of world literature. While many modern critical editions have succumbed to the fads of modernism and post-modernism, this series concentrates on critical examinations informed by our Judco-Christian heritage as passed down through the ages---the same heritage that provided the crucible in which the great authors formed these classic works. Edited by acclaimed literary biographer Joseph Pearce, the lgnatius Critical Editions ensure that readings of the works are filtered through the richness of Western tradition, meeting the authors in their clement, instead of the currently popular method of deconstructing a classic to fit a modern mindsct---a lamentable flaw that often proliferates in other series of critical editions. The Series is ideal for anyone wishing to understand the great works of Western Civilization, enabling the modern reader to enjoy these classics in the company of some of the finest literature professors alive today.