SEMINAR - Swift and The Historical Content in 'Gulliver's Travels'.

SEMINAR - Swift and The Historical Content in 'Gulliver's Travels'. As the text is complex and has two and half centuries of fierce criticism with regards to Swift's character and the content of the text and its meaning, it has been necessary to reduce the seminar topic too a manageable section. In this seminar I will be discussing one aspect of Swift and the text 'Gulliver's Travels', that of the historical content and its focus …

…his text. He seems to use the ethos of the time but rejects all else of his era. Pessimism disposed Swift to cyclical theories of History which would explain the decline of the present while allowing faint hope for the future(again,by way of return to the past). It made him accept and even exaggerate the role of chance and accident in history, it made him admire certain kinds of failure more than success.