The first study of creative and cultural afterlives of Gulliver’s Travels produced over the past 3 centuries that covers work in the form of illustrated books, comics, graphic novels, films, animations, poetry, plays and pantomimes and much more.

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.

"Daniel Cook's Gulliver's Afterlives is a fascinating voyage into three hundred years of Swiftian adaptation and appropriation. This incisive study moves deftly cross media, eras, and cultures, providing an authoritative account of how artists have been impelled to react to Gulliver's Travels." - Nicholas Seager, Keele University, UK

"Impressively global in scope, Daniel Cook’s book is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the fascinating afterlives of Lemuel Gulliver and his Travels. Theoretically informed yet consistently entertaining and accessible, Gulliver’s Afterlives offers both nuanced discussions of individual examples of Gulliveriana as well as an authoritative and skilful synthesis of the complex transmedia universe generated by Swift’s masterpiece." - Jakub Lipski, Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland