Abstract
In his 'Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study', A. W. Eddy defines Swift's work as a response to the 'popular craze for discovery' that prevailed during the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries. Indeed, the forerunners of Gulliver's Travels (1735) are numerous. Among them, we could cite Thomas More's 'Utopia' (1516), F. Godwin's 'The Man in the Moon' (1638), Defoe's Consolidator (1705) and Robinson Crusoe (1719), T. Campanella's 'The City of the Sun' (1623), and even Fr. Bacon's 'The New Atlantis' (1622), but also the writings of Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, Marco Polo and Mandeville. What is immediately noticeable in the list we have drafted, is the simultaneous presence of real and fictitious voyages, of ordinary seamen describing their discoveries, and of imaginative men shaping a variety of marvelous worlds. To sum up, on the one hand we have marvelous, fictitious and/or utopian travel-narratives, while on the other we have authentic, realistic, standard travel-narratives. Partly, due to its rich literary background, Gulliver's Travels seems to be all of them at once. Hence, it is frequently suggested that there might be more than one reading to the text. It oscillates between truth and fiction, which would allow a variety of interpretations and points of view. But in this case, could we say that there is a plurality of truths?
