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Laputian Newtons: Science, the Wood’s Halfpence Affair and Gulliver’s Travels

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Swift and Science

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Abstract

It was almost inevitable that Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), now known as Gulliver’s Travels, would be permeated with the ideas, discoveries, practices and language associated with natural knowledge, given the changes in European culture brought about by the so-called ‘scientific revolution’. The travelogue form, which parodically structures its narrative, had become increasingly influenced by empirical modes of observation during the seventeenth century, and reports of voyages and field-trips were often found within the pages of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, gratifying a readership fascinated by exotic and prodigious specimens of nature. Indeed, Barbara M. Benedict has argued that as a product of and response to this culture of enquiry and wonder, Gulliver’s Travels ‘brims with satiric targets that embody curiosity’.1

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Notes

  1. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 110.

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    Gregory Lynall (Lecturer in English)

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Lynall, G. (2012). Laputian Newtons: Science, the Wood’s Halfpence Affair and Gulliver’s Travels . In: Swift and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016966_5

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