In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

The introduction recounts the life and writing career of Jonathan Swift, centred on his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It provides an overview of the action of Swift’s masterpiece, placing the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in parallel to the events of Swift’s life: his education, early career as secretary to William Temple, forays into satire, political writings during Anne’s reign, and Irish writings in the decade before he published Gulliver. The introduction establishes the circumstances of its publication, the different states of the text (and its paratexts), and some of the main critical attitudes to the work. It summarises the chapters within the volume.

The chapter reviews literary contexts for Gulliver’s Travels, surveying relevant earlier texts, and indicating their satiric influence. With little reference to major verse satirists of Greece and Rome, key works include fictional narratives such as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and most significantly the True Histories of Lucan, and his widely copied Dialogues of the Dead. In the Renaissance, we find specific links with More’s Utopia and a general debt to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. An imaginary voyage in space available to Swift is Cyrano de Bergerac’s States and Empires of the Moon. The biggest single influence comes from the twin stories of Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. More modern writers whose practice was known to Swift are seventeenth-century English poets, headed by Dryden, Marvell, Butler, and Rochester. Contemporaries who produced effective satires in prose were Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and William King. The author’s friends in the Scriblerus group, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, naturally left some mark on Gulliver. Overall, the satiric workings of Swift’s masterpiece show abundant traces of these traditions, but its success owes most to his own comic gifts, learning, and capacity at once to attract and disturb the reader.

“The Sophists” generally refers to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon, as well as to a few lesser-known fifth-century figures; but why it does so, and what holds these men together, has been a matter of debate from Plato’s time to our own. Neither of the two standard explanations fit all and only these figures – the philosophical one, that they share some revolutionary epistemological outlook (for instance, relativism or anti-realism), or the sociological one, that they are primarily teachers of virtue of pay. This Introduction proposes revisiting the Sophists as celebrated instances of their time, a period of energetic intellectual discovery, experimentation, and communication. Doing so opens new questions about their continuity with their background culture as well as any distinctive interests, methods, or beliefs they might have. The Introduction goes on to discuss all early uses of the term sophistês in the fifth century (from Pindar through Thucydides) and its dominant uses in the fourth century, allowing us to see the range of kinds of people it applied to and the force with which it was applied. Then it describes the heterogeneous evidence base for Sophists and cognate figures. It concludes with a summary of the volume’s chapters.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.

The chapter presents the Sophists’ more original contributions to political thought and shows how some of their ideas, which were often developed in the course of their practice as advisors or pedagogues, influenced the work of the two major philosophers of the next generation, Plato and Aristotle. The chapter’s first section shows the debt of early theorizing on constitutions to the Sophists’ practice of antilogia or debate but also to the discussions about democracy that mark Athenian intellectual life in the last decades of the fifth century, and shows how such theorizing provides the springboard for Plato’s pursuit for the best constitution. Its second section focuses on the criticism of law and argues that (despite what continues to be a dominant interpretation in the study of Sophistic thinking) such criticism should not be understood as a threat to morality but rather as constructive reflection on the nature and the limits of legislation.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.

This chapter considers the immediate post-war period and the ways in which representations of the war on stage shifted in relation to changing cultural attitudes in the 1920s and 1930s. It begins with the most well-known play of the period, Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928) and shows how, rather than being unique, Journey’s End was part of a crescendo of works on the subject of war. The chapter argues that during the inter-war period playwrights made repeated attempts to find a stage language with which to speak of the shock of the battlefield, as well as the lasting imprint that it left upon every aspect of society. In examining this, the chapter considered better-known plays by authors including Noël Coward, Galsworthy, Priestly, O’Casey and Maugham alongside equally important works such as Corrie’s In Time o’ Strife: Atkinson’s The Chimney Corner, Smith’s Autumn Crocus, Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement, Box’s Angels at War, Pilcher’s The Searcher, Griffiths’ Tunnel Trench and Berkeley’s The White Chateau. As well as exploring the contribution of female playwrights, the chapter considers questions of class strife, the adaptation of veterans to post-war life, and changing sexual mores.

When, on 28 October 1726, the Travels of a certain Lemuel Gulliver came out, its author couldn’t have made a better choice to attract a large audience when he gave his most famous satire the framework of a travel account, one of the most popular genres of the time. Swift was an avid reader of travel books himself, and from his reading he was able to endow Gulliver with the characteristics of a life-like traveller and enrich his account with numerous topical elements the reader would recognize as typical of the genre. Whether all these parallels and similarities were actually sources in the sense that Swift’s imagination fed on them is not really important. What matters is the fact that the reader met with authentic elements she was accustomed to when she expected to read a travel book. Swift employed this strategy of authentification in the Travels in order to increase the impact of the satiric shock of his attack on the political and human corruptions of his time. They were also a clever sham, a wild goose chase with deceptive potential, playing on the gullibility of the readers, who had no way of verifying Gulliver’s account unless they set sail themselves.