From a master biographer and leading scholar of eighteenth-century literature comes a major new portrait of the greatest satirist in the English language.

The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, where people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of giants; and a country ruled by horses. Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with strange creatures in strange lands give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony. Illustrations.

In the 24 lectures of Rise of the Novel, take a journey from the birth of the novel to the height of the form in the mid-nineteenth century, and better understand what this literary form can tell about human nature and the unquenchable thirst for great stories. With Professor Emeritus Leo Damrosch of Harvard University as the guide, dive into some of the most notable works that helped create and shape the novel over the course of more than three centuries....