J.

Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

 Allegorical satire < imaginary journey < travel books as a popular genre in C18
 (Apparently) realistic detail meant to create circumstantiality
 Allegorical INTENT – problematic: how does the reader know what the writer wants to say? What
methods does the writer use? [allegory as a riddle, indirect – human actions, human attitudes,
parody of philosophical attitudes towards man as a rational creature]  no realistic narrative (in the
vein of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding), since Gulliver is not ripe in terms of human personality
(no Bildung)
 Mannerist elements: charming symmetry of contradictions, alternation of enthusiasm and irony, the
unreliable eiron [earnest, wise in tragedy; comic and foolish in comedy/satire] as a MASK suitable
for the impersonation of the paradoxical nature of the universe
 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965): the carnivalesque world, the world turned
upside-down principle, the contradictory nature of symbolic hierarchies, the world seen
from BELOW, the symbolic valorization of the REPUGNANT (fat, dirt, urine, faeces) and
the ASYMMETRICAL, the cultivation of the grotesque.
 Books I & II – human degeneracy: the Lilliputians as corrupt Europeans, but in Ch. 6 = a Platonic
utopian society forewarning the Houyhnhnms in Book IV; size and virtue as markers of moral
reputation (ill-governed, grotesque Lilliputians vs. Brobdingnagians – moral exemplarity)
 Book III – visits to some countries dominated by totalitarianism (Ireland under English domination),
political and scientific folly (the Academy of Lagado), legal malpractice
 Book IV – allegory of the human condition and human nature; questioning rationis capax:
Houyhnhnms (reason < Plato’s Republic – high rationality which humans cannot achieve) 
logical refutation acting only as a talking point; human nature rooted in the nature of the human
animal (instinctive, passionate – the Yahoos) – meant to puzzle, rather than entertain the reader

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1747)

- supporter of classical tradition (<Aristotle); interest in human nature (typologies derived from
real life) – imitation of real life and manners
- father of the comic epic (trivial, not serious or legendary subjects, low, individual characters,
happy-ending)  surprise/suspense and mock-heroic battles (bathos)  omniscience,
coherence and unity of design as emblems of the novel
- digressions/interpolations, metatext (“extreme scepticism”)
- the novelist “should keep within the limits not only of possibility, but of probability too” vs.
historians/writers of epic  emphasis on verisimilitude – abiding by the conventions of “formal
realism” (cf. Ian Watt)