Gulliver’s Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation

The first deep dive into the cultural afterlives of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, this book explores how the strange adventures of the 18th-century voyager have persisted over the past 300 years. Exploring sequels, spinoffs, elaborations and adaptations, among other things, Daniel Cook brings together an engaging account of how this literary classic has been reworked across different media throughout the world. Considerate of the major and unjustly neglected creators who have engaged with Travels, Gulliver’s Afterlives covers: authors from Eliza Haywood to Alison Fell; poets as varied as Alexander Pope and Sylvia Plath; playwrights including David Garrick and H. J. Byron; leading graphic artists and scripters such as Martin Rowson and Alan Moore; pioneering filmmakers such as Georges Méliès; and it even explores Gulliver’s appearances in the science fiction franchises Star Trek and Doctor Who. Cook examines more than a hundred novels, short stories and satires, poems, plays and pantomimes, live-action and animated films and television series, games, entertainment ephemera, illustrated books, comics and graphic novels, as well as statues, playpark effigies and other objects. Navigating this hefty body of Gulliveriana, this book delves into topics such as transmedial storytelling and characterization, different models of authorship and collaboration, the history of form and genre, visual culture, and the commercial contexts of literary adaptation. Incredibly comprehensive and compelling, with arch and amusing observations throughout, Gulliver’s Afterlives asks how and why Gulliver and his story has endured for the past 3 centuries, and how.