International Journal of Language & Literature

Swift’s Prophetic Vision of the Postmodern Age: the Example of Gulliver’s Travels
Maurice GNING

Abstract
Jonathan Swift is one of the major writers of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature. He writes in a context marked by the ideals of modernism. However, he satirizes in his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, the basic principles of modernism and, by extension, the Western society which is both the fruit and proponent of this ideology. In his overtly critical look at the universalizing vision of modernism the limits of which he keeps underscoring in different ways, Swift predicts the end of this great period in western and even worldwide history. At the same time, he underlines the main features of a new world that will be, over two centuries later, that of the contemporary era commonly known as the postmodern one. This article is therefore an attempt to bring out this prophetic vision of Swift expressed in Gulliver’s Travels.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n2a13