Attraction And Inspiration: National Curriculum In Penguin Readers Edition Of Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels is Jonathan Swift's best known full-length work and a classic of English literature.Because of its fantastic imagination,it always arouses the interest of children and is thus often classified as a children's book.In the nearly three centuries since its publication,the story has undergone multiple adaptations and has become a necessity in British primary school reading classroom.Penguin Readers edition of Gulliver's Travels,intended for school use,makes adjustments to the original under the requirements of the National Curriculum.The paper makes a comparison between the original and its Penguin Readers edition through textual and paratextual analysis,so as to reveal the strategies of adaptation and their effects.In the text,the adapter replaces some narration in the first-person retrospective perspective in the original with first-person experiencing perspective.The suspense and sense of immediacy it brings about,which can arouse children's curiosity and dramatizes the story,makes reading a positive exploration experience for them.Besides,the reader gets closer to the story with narrator's intrusion greatly reduced.The reader also becomes intimate with the narrator as well as the protagonist Gulliver because he is endowed with a richer inner emotional life.The adapter also adjusts the satires in a vivid and readable way.Paratext plays a crucial role in presenting the text and shaping the readers' reception of it.The adapter makes the most of paratext's controlling power.He/she festoons the text with well-designed pictures to gain readers' immediate attention.An implied reader who performs reading in a desirable way is employed in the Introduction section as a role model for actual readers to identify with.This paper comes to the conclusion that the adapter of the Penguin Readers edition of Gulliver's Travels,bearing the National Curriculum in mind,adapts the original,a prose satire,into an attractive adventure story.It increases its attraction to child readers by providing an interesting reading experience.In the meantime,it proposes a desirable reading way and constantly reminds readers to obtain from the book the most possible amount of thinking and learning.