The fantastical beings and events of Gulliver's Travels belong to that rare collection of literature that has passed into folklore, along with Alice's adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan's flights, and Huckleberry Finn's river journey. Its invented language has become a permanent part of English vocabulary (one may, after all, still be belittled as a LilliputJan), and its imagery has become part of the grammar of our stories. Though they may have no idea where it originated,even children recognize the image of Gulliver tied to the ground by thousands of threads. Yet Jonathan Swift's masterwork is also sophisticated political satire, a genre notorious for growing more difficult and obscure as the historical context in which it was written recedes from view. How do we reconcile the beloved wonder tale with Swift's excoriating, if playful, critique of his times?