Gulliver's Travels: A Norton Critical Edition: 0 (Norton Critical Editions)

Norton Critical Editions may cost a bit more but you get so much extra. They are also exceptionally well bound and printed.

The delivery was fine, the book itself is ok. The only problem was that there was a rip through one of the pages that I never noticed until I came to that page.

The most boring book ever written. Do not read this :/

Written over 250 years ago: we are told that it is intended as a political satire and an attack on the nastier aspects of human behaviour. This particular version of the book has a considerable amount of letters , comments and criticisms written by various people since it was first published in 1726. This additional material is probably more interesting than the original stories. The significance of what the author intended to achieve by publishing the stories is lost in time and this additional material gives a useful insight into the hidden meanings in the book. It is written in ye olde English with phonetic spelling which makes an interesting contribution to the debate about the need for accurate disciplined spelling. It is hard to believe now that Swift had the book published under an assumed name as a hoax ; presumably to see how long it would take some people to realise that the stories were a practical joke. There are four stories , with Lilliput being the best known; the other three less well known. According to academics, the four stories are the same stories with the same meaning ; they are presented differently, with each story making it's message more blatantly obvious for the benefit of thick people like me. I re-read the first and fourth stories after reading the additional material. I found the Lilliput story boring and the hidden symbolism was too well hidden ; the fourth story about the Hounynhynms is more direct and therefore much easier to understand the author's message. This story contains characters which are half-man , half-ape called Yahoos. According to the additional material , these characters were inspired by a debate among the so-called gentleman scientist of the time about a possible evolutionary link between African negroes, apes and Europeans. The interesting significance of this is that it is happening 100 years before Darwin's `Origin of the Species'. About half way through the fourth story, the author lets loose a tirade of abuse about the immorality of politicians and war , lawyers and the legal/justice system and the knock-out punch comes when the author starts to refer to the human race as Yahoos. If someone were to hand you a copy of the author's criticisms of politics and war , or the lawyers and legal/justice system as printed in the fourth book; you could probably be convinced that the text was copied from one of the present-day newspapers or books. The message I get from reading this type of book is that human society has changed over the span of 250 years , but the tyranny and injustice of our human society remains unchanged. The enthusiasm shown by the British government and legal/justice system towards implementing the Human Rights Legislation and the Big Brother state surveillance shows that 250 years later the author has failed miserably to get his message across.

A brilliant edition. Perfect for the students and the teachers who are looking for the 1726 text. This edition contains annotations, several critical essays and other writings, which explore how Swift satirises the English society and the empirical Enlightenment.

A edição é impecável! Sobretudo para quem deseja aprender mais sobre a obra e Jonathan Swift.

Very happy with quality and price.

While other reviews seem focused on Swift's original novel, it would seem to me that anyone reading the reviews for this particular edition would be far more interested in the quality of the contents of the Norton Critical Edition, rather than the text itself. The text, after all, is a seminal classic satire, and even the worst printing and editing would find it very difficult to obscure it. Swift is brilliant, but that is not the focus of this review. Rather, I will be discussing the merits of this particular critical edition of his work.This Norton Critical Edition is, as all Norton Critical Editions are, split up into three main parts - an authoritative version of the text with footnotes, a selection of works contemporary with the original text, and a selection of critical works dating from the original release down to the present.The text is presented in its full form, complete with the original frontispiece, illustrations from the original edition, and footnotes where appropriate. The text is reproduced faithfully, and any decisions made by the editor are duly noted in footnotes. In fact, the editor has remained so true to the original text that he has retained the 18th century convention of capitalizing every single noun. This could, conceivably, be off-putting for some modern readers. Yet, for the scholarly audience doubtless intended for this edition, it seems appropriate that such a level of faithfulness be maintained. Indeed, the intended audience seems to color the entire volume, for, if a novice reader completely new to the text were to pick up the novel for the first time in this edition, the reader might find himself occasionally bewildered. The footnotes added by the editor are judicious, but perhaps too few. If a reader is not already somewhat familiar with the conventions of 18th century London or the accompanying vocabulary, he may need to come prepared with a dictionary. This, however, is no major problem; by and large the footnotes are accurate, informative, and brief, offered only where they need offering, and never rambling on in a vain display of the editor's knowledge.The "Contexts" section is the shortest part of this edition, but is still an enjoyable and enriching read. Included in it are such sundry selections as an advertisement for Gulliver's Travels, Swift's correspondence to such contemporaries as John Gay and Alexander Pope, Pope's own poems inspired by Gulliver's travels (written through Lilliputian, Houyhnhnm, and Brobdingnagian personas), and a few selections from 18th century travelogues. These are all excellent editions to this edition - the travelogues in particular give modern readers a good sense of how Gulliver's Travels parodies a genre which has all but vanished from the modern literary scene.The "Criticism" section greets the inquisitive reader with a wealth of lenses through which to view Swift's novel. Articles dating from shortly after the novel's release right down to modern times provide erudite and clear stances on how one might read the novel. Topics discussed include reading through the lenses of: satire and allegory, virtue and truth, politics, the novel as a genre, race and gender, science, the extent to which Swift's writing was influenced by London's obsessions with the peculiar and extreme, the author-character-reader interrelationship, and how the novel's frontispiece and paratexts can be read as an integral part of the novel. Reading all of these critical pieces gives one a diverse and well-rounded appreciation of the multifarious nature of Swift's unique satirical work.While some minor quibbles could be made here and there, overall this is a very solid and effective scholarly edition. As long as those approaching this volume approach it with respect for its intended audience and are willing to engage with it as a scholarly book (and not just a children's adventure novel, as is so often the unfortunate case), this clear and entertaining edition of one of the greatest works of satire ever written props the original text up on a well-polished pedestal of context and criticism, all to the reader's delight.

Wonderful book, but you have to read it with some knowledge of Swift's era and his attitude. It is NOT a book for the casual reader. The Norton edition is superb, with lots of editorial footnotes and plenty of contemporary and modern essays on the man, the book, and the era.Howard Ferstler