ABSTRACT
Reading a literary text is a learned behavior applied to a recognized situation, an act that takes place within a particular cultural and individual context. Reading Gulliver's Travels, for instance, people will not, as did one reader in Swift's day, rush to a map in search of Lilliput; nor will people react like the bishop Swift wrote to Pope about, who thought the book to be 'full of improbable Lies, and he hardly believed a word of it'. The present-day uncertainty about the genre of Gulliver's Travels has its origin in the book's initial reception. To read Gulliver's Travels as picaresque narrative is to emphasize a series of adventures centered upon satiric interaction. There is a general consensus among interpreters of Gulliver's Travels that the book is puzzling in various ways but nevertheless a classic work of art. People recognize a combination of fictive structure and its violation as postmodernist, a rubric that will readily accommodate Gulliver's Travels.
