Reception Aesthetics of Jonathan SwiftʹʹsGulliver’s Travels

Abstract According to Hans Robert Jauss, reception history plays an important role in determining the aesthetic value of literary texts. In his famous essay “Literary History as a challenge to Literary Theory”, Jauss provides seven theses through which he clarifies how history plays an important role in reception theory and proposes objective methods through which the aesthetic value of texts can be determined. This paper seeks to apply these theses to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by considering how the work was received as part of eighteenth century history and literature and how the horizons of expectations changed among later nineteenth and twentieth century readers. In general terms, what constitutes criticism and readings of Swift’s contemporary readers is a result of their focus on the role of the author and the equality of narrator with author. However, more interest in the text itself as a work of art develops in later periods.