Tema gratis Inglese : JOHNATAN SWIFT

• LIFE AND MAIN WORKS
He was born in Ireland, Dublin, but his parents were English. He moved to England in 1688 and became a priest in 1694, the same year he turned back to Ireland. In 1713 he became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.


He was a prolific writer and wrote also pamphlets to denounce Irish’s’ sufference for England’s domain. Thanks to this activity, he was considered a hero even if he thought Ireland was just a place of exile for him.
He considered the English society corrupted and full of vices. He was also a pessimist and misanthrope. He died in 1745.
His best satires are:
- The battle of the book: he images a real battle among books and this is a satire about the merits of ancient and modern literature.
- A tale of a tub: this is a political allegory and he tells about the contending religious parties of the day.
- A modest proposal: Swift ironizes writing that poor people could redeem their condition by selling their children to rich people as food.

• GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
Gulliver’s travel isn’t a book for children only as we could think. It’s a satire about English modern
society, the condition of man, a cutting satire about his life.
Each of the four books is an attack to the world he lived in.
In the first book he describes Lilliput, an island in which small men live. When he tells about Lilliput, he’s describing England while when he writes of the wars between Lilliputians and their neighbours he’s referring to the wars between England and France.
In the second book Gulliver gets to a place in Alaska in which giants live. His little size causes him numerous misadventures but at the end he turns back to England.
In the third book Gulliver gets to Laputa, an island in which people make strange experiments. He meets unhappy people because they’re immortal and living forever doesn’t mean to be happy and young for all time.
In the fourth and last book, he gets to a place in which horses live. They’re called Houyhnhms and are superior to human beings. When he goes back home, he doesn’t stand his family’s smell of humanity so he decides to live with animals.