Recommendations
Books Like Gulliver's Travels
Best books to read after Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is one of the most celebrated satirical works in English literature — four voyages through which humanity is progressively diminished until the Yahoos reveal us to ourselves. These recommendations extend the experience through Swift's other work and through satirical fiction that shares his comprehensive contempt for human self-deception.
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A Modest Proposal
by Jonathan Swift
Swift's 1729 satirical essay proposing that the children of the Irish poor be eaten to solve poverty and overpopulation is the companion to Gulliver's Travels in its comprehensive contempt for the English political establishment and its willingness to follow a satirical argument to its logical extreme.
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Candide
by Voltaire
Voltaire's 1759 satirical novella about Candide's adventures across a world of disasters is the French Enlightenment equivalent of Gulliver's Travels — both are organized as a series of episodic voyages through which the protagonist's optimistic assumptions are systematically demolished, and both are organized around the gap between the world as idealists imagine it and as it actually is.
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The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
by Rudolf Erich Raspe
Raspe's 1785 satirical novel about the Baron's impossible adventures is the comic descendant of Gulliver's Travels — the same fantastic voyage format, the same deadpan narration of the impossible, and the same implicit critique of the travel literature genre.
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Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Orwell's 1945 allegorical fable about a farm whose animals overthrow their human farmer is the twentieth-century political satire most directly in Gulliver's tradition — the use of non-human animals to deliver a devastating critique of human political behavior, with the same allegorical simplicity and the same comprehensive contempt for the powerful.
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's 1932 dystopia, in which the happiness of a scientific society is purchased at the cost of freedom, depth, and individuality, is organized around the same argument as the Houyhnhnms episode of Gulliver's Travels — the question of whether a rational, perfectly organized society would be human in any sense we would recognize.
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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's 1749 comic epic is the contemporary alternative to Gulliver's satirical darkness — both are panoramic works that survey the full range of English social life, but where Swift's tone is savage, Fielding's is comic and relatively forgiving of human weakness.
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The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Grass's 1959 novel about Oskar Matzerath, who stops growing at three to protest the adult world, is the twentieth-century German equivalent of Gulliver's device — a physically unusual observer who makes the familiar world strange by seeing it from an unexpected angle.
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain
Twain's 1889 satirical novel about a nineteenth-century American transported to Arthurian England is the American comic continuation of the Gulliverian tradition — the same device of placing a pragmatic modern man in an impossible setting to expose the absurdity of the setting's values and assumptions.
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