billybookblog

*contains spoilers* What to say…what to say…what to say. There’s just so much – I suppose it’s more a case of what to leave out. Let’s begin with the basics: so our protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, is a surgeon who loves the idea of travelling, and so he decides to set sail under a captain and his crew, and along the way always seems to find himself shipwrecked. After each expedition, he manages to get home to England, but cannot help but set out on new adventures, leaving his wife and children back home to worry about him. These new lands Gulliver finds himself waking up to, however, are not what you’d quite expect… Now, Swift has established a wonderfully inventive conceit here, one that allows him to flex and fold his keen social, natural, political, theological muscles. As Gulliver finds himself in the miniscule Lilliput, a place where the inhabitants are comparatively small – six inches to Gulliver’s guessing eye – Swift gives Gulliver and the reader a perspective that is far-reachin...

*contains spoilers* There are several reasons why I have opted to blog (for the mean time, anyway) on only the first two Books of Edmund Spenser’s remarkable epic poem, The Faerie Queene , but the easiest to admit is that there is just so much to talk about that I feel the one, all-inclusive blog wouldn’t give the text sufficient justice to speak of its various qualities. This poem deserves the adjective ‘epic’ in all respects: for starters, it is a substantial work, consisting of seven books (in my Everyman edition, anyway – it depends which one you manage to find), each book made up of twelve cantos, the cantos themselves each having approximately 40-60 stanzas within; it is also an allegorical work, much like The Divine Comedy or Piers Plowman that came before it, which hopes to imbue an already weighty narrative with important social, political, cultural and religious messages. Boiling down to the make up of the stanzas, we see something quite unique, which makes this whole exper...