Chapter 12 - Travel and Exploration

Summary

Swift wrote the most widely reprinted and profound fictional travel account in all literature. This chapter suggests that Swift’s Anglo-Irish status, and repeated travel between England and Ireland, shaped his perspective on travel. The first section of the chapter focuses on Swift’s own travels across the Irish Sea and on Irish roads. The second section looks into the Grand Tour and Swift’s reading of travel narratives. The third section shows how Swift’s reading of first-hand travelogues shaped the larger structure of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift is typical of his period in regarding travel writing as equally enlightening and suspect. He is atypical in being uncertain about his own place in the world, both geographically and professionally. However, it is that very uncertainty that grants Swift the ironic distance necessary to transform the popular form of the travel narrative into a timeless commentary on the human condition.