American Notes : Charles Dickens's Version of Gulliver's Travel

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  • American Notes : Charles Dickens's Version of Gulliver's Travels

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The present paper clarifies how Charles Dickens devised a method and satirical style similar to that used in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, by examining the common features of Dickens's American Notes and Gulliver's Travels. ""Custom familiarizes one to anything,"" Dickens the traveler says in American Notes. He bitterly criticizes customs both in America and in England, and most importantly, warns against the kind of familiarization which makes people narrow-minded, insensitive, and impervious. Dickens, as the first-person narrator, is a satirist like Gulliver, bringing into light the trap and horror of familiarization and its relation to imagination. He does this through direct allusions to Gulliver's Travels and his own keen and effective satire.

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