Gulliver and Beyond

Ruth Menzies

A one-day conference organised by the Texts and their Afterlives Research Group (Britaix 17-18), LERMA, Aix-Marseille Université.

9h15: Welcome and coffee
9h45: Introduction and presentation
Morning panel. Chair: Professor Jean Viviès (LERMA, Aix-Marseille University)
10h00: Mickaël Popelard (University of Caen Normandy): The Philosophical and Scientific Background to Gulliver&#x27;s Travels 
10h45: Jeffrey Hopes: “To behold my Figure often in a Glass”: Gulliver’s Travels and Lockean consciousness of self.
12h: Lunch break
Afternoon panel. Chair: Dr Ruth Menzies (LERMA, Aix-Marseille University)
13h30: Nick Seager (Keele University): Winking at Littleness: Scale, Species, and Satire in Brobdingnag
14h15: Daniel Cook (University of Dundee): Gulliver’s Clones
15h00: Conclusion

Gulliver and Beyond
Bios and Abstracts


Professor Mickaël Popelard (University of Caen Normandy): “The Philosophical and Scientific Background to Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa”

Ever since Nora Mohler and Marjorie Nicolson published their seminal article in Annals of Science in 1937, there has been a general consensus among scholars that Gulliver’s third voyage is best understood as a witty, albeit not always very subtle, send-up of the Royal Society. In this presentation, however, my main focus will not be Swift’s historical sources but rather the philosophical and theoretical background to his criticism of science. I will aim at showing that Swift’s satire on science is threefold, presenting as it does scientific investigation as comical, pointless and dangerous. More fundamentally, what “A Voyage to Laputa” shows, I will contend, is Swift’s deep-seated and impregnable belief that nature – whether it is human nature or the physical world in general – should not be tampered with. Far from improving “man’s estate” (Bacon, New Atlantis), as is generally believed, the scientist only succeeds in ruining the timeless perfection of nature.

Mickaël Popelard is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Caen Normandy. His research interests include early modern drama as well as the history of ideas. He is currently working on a translation of Bacon’s literary works to be published with Classiques Garnier.



Professor Jeffrey Hopes (University of Orléans, retired): “ “To behold my Figure often in a Glass”: Gulliver’s Travels and Lockean consciousness of self”

This paper proposes to read Gulliver&#x27;s Travels in the context of John Locke&#x27;s writing on personal identity and the self in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Swift&#x27;s explicit references to Locke are few and far between and the direct influence Locke had on the Travels is moot. Yet the Essay&#x27;s radical redefinition of the self is a fundamental parameter and context of both the text of Gulliver&#x27;s Travels and the way it has been read, then and now, given that our present conceptions of the self and personal identity are still fundamentally Lockeian. After examining four key components of Locke&#x27;s definition of self - its definition as a sentient entity situated in the mind, its reflexive consciousness, its continuity or stability over time, and its fundamental subjectivism – I will examine how these issues inform so many of the questions raised by readings of the Travels Drawing on a variety of writing on Locke&#x27;s Essay, I will focus, by way of example, on the work of one critic, Denis Donoghue, to illustrate the ways in which the Travels, despite their proclaimed anti-modernism, constantly raise issues of modernism, even in the work of a professedly traditionalist critic like Donoghue. Finally, I will suggest that the conjunction of Locke and Swift invites us to reflect on our own reactions to and readings of Gulliver&#x27;s Travels and our own consciousness of a reading self. 

Jeffrey Hopes taught in several French universities and has published on a wide variety of eighteenth-century writing, focusing in particular on Defoe, Swift and the theatre. His monograph on Gulliver&#x27;s Travels (in French) appeared in 2001 when the Travels were on the programme of the Agrégation exam. He is now retired and living near Orléans where he finished his career. He does not spend his time talking to horses. 
Professor Nicholas Seager, (Keele University): &quot;Winking at Littleness: Scale, Species, and Satire in Brobdingnag&quot;
This talk re-examines Gulliver&#x27;s second voyage, to consider the treatment of the protagonist&#x27;s species identity when he is miniaturized, infantilized, objectified, and commodified in Brobdingnag. Animal analogies abound while Gulliver is treated as a performing creature, as a pet, or as prey, and Gulliver comes into contact with numerous beasts, domestic and wild. In these comparisons and encounters, as has been acknowledged, Swift examines the limits of the human, anticipating Gulliver&#x27;s fuller alienation from humanity in Part IV. The presentation focuses on the issue of humiliation, asking whether this is one of the differentiators of humans and animals in the world of the Travels and its reception.

Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Keele University. He has recently completed an edition of Daniel Defoe&#x27;s letters for Cambridge University Press, which will be published in 2022. He is also editing The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe and (with Daniel Cook) The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver&#x27;s Travels. His ongoing research is provisionally titled The Bastard&#x27;s Progress, a study of the varied literary and cultural afterlives of the eighteenth-century poet Richard Savage.



Dr Daniel Cook (University of Dundee): “Gulliver’s Clones” 

Since its first appearance in 1726, Gulliver&#x27;s Travels has been widely adapted, extended, or otherwise rewritten. For convenience, we refer to this body of materials as &quot;Gulliveriana&quot;. Arguably the most persistent form of Gulliveriana centres not on a legitimate, early eighteenth-century Lemuel Gulliver but on his fictional clones, whether nominal offspring or time-forwarded travellers who share his name. Some were self-proclaimed descendants, such as Philip Hippophil (a great-grandson on the father’s side) in Walter Copland Perry’s The Revolt of the Horses (1898), a war-torn and relocated extension of the story of the Houyhnhnms. The most famous clone appeared early, in Pierre-François Desfontaines’s Le Nouveau Gulliver (1730), which John Lockman translated into English a year later as The Travels of Mr. John Gulliver, Son to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver, and which responded to Desfontaines’s very loose translation of the original, Les Voyages Gulliver. Lemuel Gulliver, Jun. is also the pseudonymous author of Modern Gulliver’s Travels, where he finds Lilliput almost a century after his father had discovered it. Yet another Gulliver the Younger “retraces” (his word) his father’s steps in Voyage to Locuta (1818), though he opts to proceed “still farther”, just beyond Laputa, to explore another island in a similar setting – repetition with a difference. Studying Gulliver&#x27;s clones reveals new things about the critical and creative reception of Swift&#x27;s original work, and about the theory and practice of literary appropriation.

Dr Daniel Cook is Reader in English and Associate Director of the Centre for Scottish Culture at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Reading Swift&#x27;s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). With Nicholas Seager he edited The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2015; paperback 2018). They are currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver&#x27;s Travels.

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