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RONALD KNOWLES. Gulliver's Travels: The Politics of Satire. New York: Twayne, 1996. Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Pp. ix + 169. $23.95.
The announced audience for Mr. Knowles' s study of Gulliver's Travels is high school and lower level university students as well as the ubiquitous general reader; scholars of the eighteenth-century will find little new in either contextualization or interpretation of the Travels.
Part one of Mr. Knowles's book focuses on literary and historical contexts. The first of these chapters discusses travel literature from the classical world to the eighteenth century. Typically, while he provides a wealth of important information, he tends to cite too many examples with too little discussion for his audience. For example, in a paragraph in which he will go on to mention, in addition to More' s Utopia, Plato, Johann Valentin Andreae, Tommaso Campanella, Bacon, Gabriel Foigny, and Denis Vairasse d' Alais, Mr. Knowles says that in Utopia, "Hythloday presents a society enlightened by a communistic sense of public good, looking back to Stoicism and forward to Marxism. As such it is in contrast with the rampant materialism and power...