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Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. Although he spent most of his childhood in Ireland, he considered himself English, and, aged twenty-one, moved to England, where he found employment as secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple. On Temple's death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin to pursue a career in the Church. By this time he was also publishing in a variety of genres, and between 1704 and 1729 he produced a string of brilliant satires, of which Gulliver's Travels is the best known. Between 1713 and 1742 he was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin; he was buried there when he died in 1745. Jonathan Swift's masterpiece is the finest satire in the English language. Shipwrecked traveler Lemuel Gulliver finds himself washed ashore in Lilliput, a kingdom populated by tiny people. Fascinated by their exotic visitor, the Lilliputians enlist Gulliver's services in their bitter civil war. But Gulliver becomes the object of a court intrigue and has to make a hasty escape. On his next voyage, his ship is blown off course to Brobdingnag, whose giant inhabitants strike him as horrific and occasionally revolting. A third journey takes him to Laputa, a floating island occupied by pedantic scientists and philosophers. Finally, he encounters a society of rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, and witnesses the appalling behaviour of their servants the Yahoos, a group who are in many ways disturbingly similar to Man at his most bestial. Swift's brilliantly original story is a timeless portrait of the human condition in all its misery and majesty. Zusammenfassung Jonathan Swift's masterpiece is the finest satire in the English language. Lemuel Gulliver's adventures with the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput and the giants of Brobdingnag are familiar from modern abridged adaptations, but the scientists and philosophers of Laputa, the intelligent, horselike Houyhnhnms and the bestial Yahoos provide further opportunities for Swift to satirise society in a manner just as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. lllustrated by Arthur Rackham, with an afterword by Henry Hitchings. ...
