Rory Carroll, The Guardian; Gulliver fans celebrate three centuries of Jonathan Swift’s classic satire
"In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.
His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.
An immediate sensation, it skewered Georgian pretensions and entered popular culture through translations, children’s versions, comics and films. The anniversary is now being celebrated at Swift’s alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and at events around Ireland.
Exhibitions, festivals, seminars, art competitions and workshops are exploring the origins of Swift’s masterpiece, its retelling through a feminist lens, and its prophetic depiction of a society in thrall to a form of artificial intelligence...
Gulliver’s experiences in Laputa, a floating island dedicated to arts and science, resonated with our era’s anxieties about technology, said Douglas. Its inhabitants seek to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and obtain knowledge via an “engine” of wires, handles and paper that can produce tracts on philosophy, poetry and mathematics “without the least assistance from genius or study”."
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