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The translation of references specific to a given source culture has long been a prominent, and often problematic aspect of translation practice and research. In indirect translation, or the translation of already translated material, linguistic and cultural differences accumulate, meaning that the omission of cultural references (CRs) or culture-specific items (CSIs) might be a generally expected outcome. Yet before such hypotheses can be tested, research methods are needed that can account for broad patterns across whole texts, and preferably, across semantic categories, genres, time periods, and languages. A ‘textual’ approach, focused on the linguistic context in which CRs are likely to occur, should complement the currently dominant ‘cultural’ approach, which mainly relies on predefined categories and intuition for the selection of objects of study. This article illustrates that corpus research, and particularly keyness analysis, can aid in uncovering recurrent structural patterns and textual functions in which CRs are expected to pose translation difficulties. In this regard, it focuses on expressions of enumeration, or lists, and indicators of identification, or voice. Based on a trilingual (English, French, and Italian) corpus-assisted study of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and John Cary’s An Essay on the State of England (1695), the article accentuates the productive complementarity of numerical operations and context-sensitive readings.

The visual quality of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, together with its popular and folkloric ingredients, has greatly contributed to the novel's immediate transmedial reception and was central to its success during the so-called "golden age" of visual satire in the British Isles. Starting with the end of the eighteenth century, caricaturists transformed Swift's work into a symbol of society's mechanisms and structures. Indeed, in its frequent nineteenth-century adaptations into graphic form, Gulliver's Travels has been exploited to identify social or political identity and otherness, to express suspicion against any form of authority, and to undermine monologic perspectives on current political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented, including one which examined the extent to which in-city agriculture could be the answer to increased corporatisation and food insecurity, and another which explored environmental issues by choosing anthropocentric view of settlement in favour of dynamic adaptive coevolution between human development and interacting natural processes.

The paper discusses Silviu Purcarete's 2012 theatrical production Călătoriile lui Gulliver/Gulliver's Travels, staged at the "Radu Stanca" Theatre in Sibiu, Romania, as an appropriation of Swift's famous satire, which uses fragments from it and from three other of his satirical texts, brought together in a multi-layered palimpsestic intertext. This intertext makes use of the title story as a frame narrative for a series of "scenic exercises" that deconstruct and critically as well as artistically reinterpret the writer's misanthropic vision of the human condition, pointing to its philosophical relevance in a contemporary context and to the director's philosophical affinity with the Anglo-Irish satirist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, is one of the classics of English literature, a biting satire of English customs and politics in particular and of human foibles in general. While literary scholars have traditionally agreed that, in Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift uses his elegant anthropomorphic horses and his filthy human-like Yahoos to reflect on society and human nature, some recent studies highlight Swift’s ecocritical concern with animal issues, focusing on how the behaviour of the noble horses challenges the conventional hierarchies of the anthropocentric view of the world and anticipates values that are prominent in today’s society. However, this article aims to show that what has traditionally challenged and disturbed readers, publishers and critics for many years is the presence of the other race of the animal world, the Yahoos. Analysing the reception of Gulliver’s journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms helps understand how Swift’s early ecocritical ideas disturbed publishers and translators, who often rejected or modified the text, particularly those passages in which the filthy human-like Yahoos show their harsh and scatological behaviour.

The machine presented in the Academy of Lagado in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels exemplifies the fantasy of collecting the entirety of all possible texts. The imaginary device foreshadows major questions raised by mathematics and probabilities as well as the recent progress made by natural language processing with automatic text and translation generators. These real machines, however, appear to dismantle the ideal of infinity which fiction portrayed. Swift’s satire disclosed, in the early 18th century, the danger induced by reasoning on infinity when dealing with finite numbers. Indeed, algorithms do not seem to create the infinity of possibilities which were envisioned, but tend, on the contrary, to unify speech. When machines leave the realm of fiction, the texts which they churn out no longer follow the principle of infinity but that of totality, in Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense of the word. The excerpt’s lack of popularity may thus be linked to the uneasiness it triggers when one is confronted to the new forms of humanism linked with the idea of artificial intelligence conveyed by the Silicon Valley.

The Struldbrugs episode occupies Chapter X at the end of Part III of Gulliver’s Travels. It features Immortals while Gulliver is in Luggnagg. It has often been read as an almost autonomous episode, and sometimes described as a fable. But it is nonetheless integrated into a narrative that has its own logic and structure. Its narrative construction leads to a reading that is different from that of Gulliver within the text. The philosophical reflection on death and immortality is inserted at a point that makes sense in the general economy of the work. Probably written last, the episode is set in a double time, in and out of a narrative sequence, within a travel narrative and outside a sequence of adventures. The Struldbrugs ultimately evoke the characters of literature, both mortal and immortal.

The satire in Swift’s anatomy of the human animal in Gulliver’s Travels is unusually radical, comprehensive and aggressive. In the first three books it conventionally attacks humans for what they do, but at the end of book III and throughout book IV humans are attacked for what they are. From the beginning, the reader is wrongfooted by an unusually quarrelsome intimacy on the part of the narrative, and a constantly shifting instability in the register of the irony. The naïve Gulliver’s praise of humanity, as well as his deranged condemnation of it in the final book, are both separate from the implied voice of the satirist, which always makes itself felt. But the reader is left uncertain as to the exact degree and tone of this separation. While knowing that the details of Gulliver’s enraged diatribes are substantiated by the facts of the narrative, the unhinged nature of the speaker’s voice must be discounted as being in Timon’s manner which Swift explicitly disavowed in a famous letter to his friend Pope. The reader is thus left without the comfort and foothold of an extreme denunciation which could be dismissed as self-disarming precisely because the implied satirist’s voice is disengaged from the character. This is part of what Swift meant when he told Pope that the story was designed to vex the world rather than divert it.

Judicious, candid, curious, indulgent, gentle, courteous, ignorant… Lemuel Gulliver characterizes his readers in various ways. Although such modifiers may appear merely formulaic, they are an integral part of the complex relationship Jonathan Swift weaves with his readers. These interjections posit types of readers, highlighting a metatextual process whereby Gulliver’s Travels explores the relationship between readers and texts, while simultaneously foregrounding its own unreliable textuality. Some of the modifiers used endow the fictional readers with laudable qualities, inciting actual readers to presume that they possess such merits; others are such that readers may prefer to consider that they apply only to other, hypothetical readers. However, Swift’s satire precludes such reassuring impulses, forcing readers to assess their own nature and their status as readers, reflecting on reading texts while engaged in that very act. Although the narrator repeatedly states his disinclination to trouble the reader, reading Gulliver’s Travels therefore remains an extremely troubling experience.

Just So Stories for Little Children (1902) enjoyed a phenomenal reception. Accompanying Kipling's affection for children was a pronounced desire to experiment in the creation of fiction and poetry, leading to originality through inventiveness, the continuing legendary appeal of which argues forcefully for this being Kipling's most successful book. The most enduring impression that Kipling wanted to leave on his beloved child audience is that these stories are magical, the purpose being not to teach children morality but to transport them to the realm of magic. But this is not just "children's literature." Adults are Kipling's intended audience, too, and the elusiveness of truth is a major theme, which the criticism to date has not clearly understood. In a world where truth fades before us, what can humankind do that is truly uplifting? This article delves into Kipling's answer, which may well prove surprising to many. [146 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places the curiously unqueer, because largely uncrip, reparative ethos of José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia in dialogue with the dystopian affect and aesthetic of Gulliver's Travels. To appreciate the queer dynamics of Swift's novel, we must adopt a suitably Swiftian stance: affirming the unbecoming, and decidedly crip, sensibility of the satire. Indeed, the novel's enablingly disabling 'disability aesthetic' helps controvert the continuing misimpression of queerness as perennially new: as at best materialised as fetish, a literally utopian 'nowhere' through which one may cruise, au flâneur, but never truly alight upon, muddy oneself within or, above all, linger in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the layered nature of animality, maternity and abjection epitomised by Gulliver's frightening adventures in Brobdingnag. I focus specifically on the maternal force‐feeding that Gulliver is subjected to by the Brobdingnagian monkey, which he describes as 'the greatest Danger I ever faced in the Kingdom'. The monkey is killed following the episode, which temporarily restores Gulliver's stalwart sense of self. I contend that the monkey incident in Brobdingnag decentres Gulliver's sense of identity and demonstrates the violability of his body by the feminised animal, which ultimately destabilises his sense of masculinity and opens myriad queer potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to situate Jonathan Swift and his reception in the modern history of sexual norms. Through close attention to several moments across Swift's canon that touch on non‐normative sexuality, and to early intertexts that interpret those moments, including an unsolicited illustration by William Hogarth, I contend that Swift should be recognised – and was recognised by his initial readers – not only for testing the limits of sexual propriety but also for exposing, with characteristically devious subtlety, the contradictory and unpredictably destructive means by which sexual conduct began to be classified and regulated in post‐1688 Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the modern western civilization and its social elements that inspired T.S. Eliot to write his widely critiqued "The Waste Land" which laments over the debasement of socio-psychological and moral aspects of humanity. Besides, this paper also delves into finding the possibility of connection between Eliotian chaos and an apparent misanthropy brought forth by Jonathan Swift in his much acclaimed satire Gulliver's Travels. In both cases, it seems the authors suggest to darker follies of human nature which loom large against the backdrop of a capitalistic and scientifically advanced western world. Initially it seems there is a hidden correlation that inspired both the writers to craft their respective signature works. To put it in simple terms, western belief, pattern of logic, scientific advancement and extreme adherence to rationality often result in nothingness that eventually leads them to chaos and sufferings. In contrast to this, once hugely stereotyped 'exotic, sensual, and crazy' orient suddenly appears with its tranquility and connectedness enough to provide salvation from western chaos and sufferings, although this does not change the orient from its apparent disorderly ordered shape. At least this is what is presented in a 2016 Hollywood movie "Doctor Strange" and a 1980 South African movie named "Gods Must Be Crazy". In both the movies it seems they provide a veiled harmony which is beyond western way of looking at life, if not the whole humanity. This particular harmony nurtures the belief that modern western irregularities vanishes when set in an oriental context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, is one of the classics of English literature, a biting satire of English customs and politics in particular and of human foibles in general. While literary scholars have traditionally agreed that, in Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift uses his elegant anthropomorphic horses and his filthy human-like Yahoos to reflect on society and human nature, some recent studies highlight Swift’s ecocritical concern with animal issues, focusing on how the behaviour of the noble horses challenges the conventional hierarchies of the anthropocentric view of the world and anticipates values that are prominent in today’s society. However, this article aims to show that what has traditionally challenged and disturbed readers, publishers and critics for many years is the presence of the other race of the animal world, the Yahoos. Analysing the reception of Gulliver’s journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms helps understand how Swift’s early ecocritical ideas disturbed publishers and translators, who often rejected or modified the text, particularly those passages in which the filthy human-like Yahoos show their harsh and scatological behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers and critics alike have bickered over the verisimilitude of Gulliver’s Travels since it was first published in 1726. No critical consensus has ever been reached even on some very fundamental interpreting issues. While several particulars of Swift’s satire appear to have been decoded and agreed upon, such as the parody of travel literature and the attack on Walpole’s corrupt administration, some others are still debated over, even after more than a century of modern criticism, such as the overall object of the universally reverberating satire and what it teaches us about Swift’s own values and worldview. Fully aware of the Gulliverian critical deadlock the world is still in, we suggest in the present article that the narratorial duet Swift-Gulliver ‘conspires’ against readers, be they innocent (gullible) or competent (lucid): by construing the latter as a microcosm who explores the world in order to gain identity, the former stages an elaborate hoax in which a potentially paranoid narrative is cunningly brought within the boundaries of acceptable, coherent discourse, with a view to achieving his far-reaching satire.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, published in 1726, was analyzed from the viewpoint of scaling in comparative physiology. According to the original text, the foods of 1724 Lilliputians, tiny human creatures, are needed for Gulliver, but the author found that those of 42 Lilliputians and of 1/42 Brobdingnagians (gigantic human creatures) are enough to support the energy of Gulliver. The author further estimated their heartbeats, respiration rates, life spans and blood pressure. These calculations were made by the use of three equations, i.e., body mass index (BMI = W/H2) and quarter-power laws (E∝W3/4 and T∝W1/4), where W, H, E, and T denote body weight, height, energy and time, respectively. Their blood pressures were estimated with reference to that of the giraffe and barosaurus, a long-neck dinosaur. Based on the above findings, the food requirement of Gulliver in the original text should be corrected after almost three centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks’s grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown’ struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown’s (and Banks’s) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a “sad lot” of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of “Irish laddies” in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions.

This article discusses the various ways in which Platonic philosophy shapes Houyhnhnmland as described in Voyage IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. As a means to do so, it takes into consideration Plato’s Republic and his theories on the perfect state, as well as the Greek philosopher’s dialogue Phaedrus, which contains the Platonic theory of the tripartite human soul. The final claim of this article is that both the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos are “pure souls” made up of just one of the three soul components pointed out by Plato (namely, the appetites in the case of the Yahoos, and the rational part in that of the Houyhnhnms). In contrast with both, man constitutes an ambiguous and complex being with a multi-natured soul that shares features with the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms alike.

The illustration of the "knowledge engine" included in early editions of Gulliver's Travels is an engraving of a sketch from the notebook of Lemuel Gulliver. In other words, it is a purely fictional object. Yet, Swift's fictional invention and its graphic representations have become part of the documented historical lineage of computing machines. Furthermore, one of Swift's purposes for inventing the "knowledge engine" was to satirize the scientific and technical cultures that now claim it as part of their history. As one piece of the elaborate discursive and material code of Gulliver's Travels, "the knowledge engine," its sources, and its reception offer some unique insights into the relationships that exist amongst factual and fictional narratives, scientific and humanistic discourse, words and images, and print and digital technologies. Although numerous scientific and philosophical texts have been cited as possible sources informing Swift's satirical invention, this article considers a lesser known one, John Peter's 1677 pamphlet Artificial Versifying, or the Schoolboy's Recreation, which is itself a print-based textual machine for generating lines of Latin hexameter verse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay focusses on Lemuel Gulliver’s returns to England in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The traveller’s four returns at the end of each part emerge as crucial loci of the narrative which offer the reader insights into Gulliver‘s gradual disintegration. The gradual difficulty of the sailor’s successive returns culminates in the last return whose problematical meaning leads the reader to reconsider the overall interpretation of the text.

Computational drafting allows architects to zoom in and out of their creations-in-progress as never before. However, when it comes to digital fabrication processes, changes in scale can have insurmountable implications in terms of structural stability and load bearing - as Guest-Editor Neil Leach explains here. Therefore, he argues, rather than dreaming of scaling up 3D printing to the dimension of buildings and cities, architects do better to focus their enthusiasm for this new technology on smaller-scale areas of their practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee's novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe's great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee's novels and Swift's works--nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver's Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee's attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee's oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks's grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown' struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown's (and Banks's) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a "sad lot" of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of "Irish laddies" in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because they are aimed at a specific readership meant to be easily impressionable, children’s books have often been used as a means of propaganda. After a historical overview of publishing for children in Ireland, which will enable us to understand the relationships of this industry with a country as it was undergoing a decolonisation process, this paper will concentrate on a more contemporaneous aspect of children’s books.The last fifteen years or so have brought tremendous changes in Ireland. The quick economic growth has provided an increase of investments in various fields. This paper will seek to show how this new influx of money has influenced the children’s book industry. It will analyze the evolution of children’s books publishing since the 1990s, paying particular attention to the part played by the Arts Councilin the development of children’s books’ lists within various publishing houses, and to the status of children’s books author in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century. It will purposely tackle the issue of the circulation of children’s books written by Irish authors in the rest of Europe, and the world. Finally, it will underline the repercussions of the economic growth on both the content and form of recently published books.

A literary criticism of the Jonathan Swift's ''Gulliver's Travels'' is presented. It focuses on the Menippean satire as a literary genre indicated by critic Northrop Frye. According to the critic, Menippean satire connects traditions of the ancient genre with later various literary modes.

The illustration of the “knowledge engine” included in early editions of Gulliver’s Travels is an engraving of a sketch from the notebook of Lemuel Gulliver. In other words, it is a purely fictional object. Yet, Swift's fictional invention and its graphic representations have become part of the documented historical lineage of computing machines. Furthermore, one of Swift’s purposes for inventing the “knowledge engine” was to satirize the scientific and technical cultures that now claim it as part of their history. As one piece of the elaborate discursive and material code of Gulliver’s Travels, “the knowledge engine,” its sources, and its reception offer some unique insights into the relationships that exist amongst factual and fictional narratives, scientific and humanistic discourse, words and images, and print and digital technologies. Although numerous scientific and philosophical texts have been cited as possible sources informing Swift’s satirical invention, this article considers a lesser known one, John Peter’s 1677 pamphlet Artificial Versifying, or the Schoolboy’s Recreation, which is itself a print-based textual machine for generating lines of Latin hexameter verse.

This article, a literary and philosophical dialogue on lying in the eighteenth century and beyond, uses the writings of Jonathan Swift as a springboard for an interdisciplinary conversation on the truth conditions of human (and Houyhnhnm) communication. In the first two sections, Brean Hammond examines the cultural and political conditions that produced Swift’s anxiety over a polity he considered to be riddled with untruth, leading to his imagining, inGulliver’s Travels, a species incapable of lying. In the final section, Gregory Currie considers Swift’s conception of creatures only able to tell truth – the Houyhnhnms – from a modern philosophical standpoint. Lying is deceptive wrongness and is as universally deplored as it is practised. The Houyhnhnms in Swift’sGulliver’s Travels, who have no inclination to lie and find it hard even to understand mendacity in the abstract, are a literary rebuke to human shortcomings in this regard. What do they tell us about Swift’s attitude to truth and falsity in the context of early eighteenth-century politics and imaginative writing? What role does intention play in the unfailing linguistic truthfulness of the Houyhnhnms? And what would a language be like in which one could not lie? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a world classic, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is on the compulsory reading list for elementary students in China, and many school editions have been published to meet this curricular requirement. This paper aims to reveal how the paratext, which is often neglected because of its peripheral position, contributes to moral education, especially in influencing young readers' positive interpretation of the protagonist. The two additional narrators which are introduced in the paratext by the translator/adapter form a dialogue with the main story and represent an effort to harness the story with a specific moral educational direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Swift, proper words in proper places definitely means economical writing, but it can also mean using the right set of words in the right spatial or geographic context. This interpretation is particularly relevant in reading Gulliver's Travels. The book's narrator, Lemuel Gulliver, claims "great Facility by the Strength of [his] Memory" in "learning the Language" of non-English speakers. Yet, Gulliver's catalog of acquired languages does not help him in his travels; Gulliver's known languages fail him. However, his capacity for language acquisition does not. However, this adaptability is not without its price; as Gulliver becomes more adept at each language, he becomes less certain of the superiority of his own culture and less convinced that his "Englishness" makes him extraordinary. In this regression of anglophilia, Gulliver becomes a satire of the colonialist fear that increased exposure to native culture would weaken the traveler's loyalty to England and moral character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to compare the imaginary of air and the mythopoeia of utopian/dystopian lands in the sky as represented in fantasy fiction. According to Tolkien, the fantasy story configures a secondary world based on the reader's secondary belief formed through reading. This sub-created world is often grounded on earth; even outer-space fantasy still depicts a world set in another planet. Nevertheless, the mythopoeia of a floating island remains a recurrent space in fantasy since Swift's creation of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels (1726). This mythopoeia extends to other media such as animation and video games as in Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) and the video game BioShock Infinite (2013). Placing emphasis on the archetypal image of Laputa, the present study treats this airborne fantasy space from three vantage points: antigravity vis-à-vis utopia of air; utopia existing with time; and utopia to dystopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]