Voltaire met Swift's circle during his English exile and admired Gulliver's Travels. Micromégas turns Swift's play with scale outward into space: giants from Sirius and Saturn who find humanity tiny, quarrelsome and absurdly proud.
Book· 1726· Adventure
Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels: 3 recorded works trace back to it, and it draws on 3 recorded sources.
What Gulliver's Travels influenced
Works that record this one as a source, with the evidence a contributor gave.
Colson Whitehead on the structure (NPR Fresh Air, 2016): "Sort of like Gulliver's Travels, the book is rebooting every time the person goes through a different state." Each state Cora reaches is a different society's answer to slavery, as each of Gulliver's islands is a different satire.
Miyazaki took the name and idea of his floating city from Swift's flying island of Laputa, and the film says so: Pazu explains that Laputa appears in Gulliver's Travels.
What influenced Gulliver's Travels
The works this one is recorded as drawing on.
Lucian's voyage is the model for the satirical impossible voyage that Swift made his own: a narrator who swears to the truth of plainly absurd travels, used to mock travellers' tales and the society at home. Swift knew Lucian well, and A True Story is routinely named first among Gulliver's classical ancestors.
Cyrano's Moon is a society that treats the human visitor as a curiosity and turns his customs back on him, the device Swift uses in Brobdingnag and among the Houyhnhnms. Swift's debt to Cyrano has been argued since the eighteenth century.
Real-world influences
Events, places, movements and ideas outside fiction that this work is recorded as drawing on.
Politics & Society
Real world
Real-world influenceHIGH
- Whig and Tory politics
Swift satirised the English politics of his day: Lilliput's High-Heels and Low-Heels are the Tories and the Whigs.