Real or imagined? The non-fictional and the fictional in Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

In these works of fiction, the characters and societies described, as well as the travels recounted by the narrators, were imagined by their authors. Generations of critics and scholars, though, have tried to decode and to analyse elements of reality or of veracity in these texts. In the following essay, I focus on some features both texts have in common, while trying to answer the following questions: to what extent were both authors’ imaginations influenced or fed by previous or contemporary travel literature? To what extent do fictional situations and societies reflect the authors’ contemporary political institutions and societies? And to what extent do the narrators reflect the personal views or aspirations of the two authors?