Gulliver's Travels (The Norton Library)

Part of the Norton Library series

The Norton Library edition of Gulliver’s Travels features the text of the 1735 revised edition, edited for the modern reader by Daniel Cook. An introduction by Cook offers a friendly navigation guide to Gulliver’s fantastical adventures in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms, highlighting the work’s pioneering genre experiments and blistering satire of eighteenth-century British culture and politics.

The Norton Library is a growing collection of high-quality texts and translations―influential works of literature and philosophy―introduced and edited by leading scholars. Norton Library editions prepare readers for their first encounter with the works that they’ll re-read over a lifetime.

• Inviting introductions highlight the work’s significance and influence, providing the historical and literary context students need to dive in with confidence.
• Endnotes and an easy-to-read design deliver an uninterrupted reading experience, encouraging students to read the text first and refer to endnotes for more information as needed.
• An affordable price (most $10 or less) encourages students to buy the book and to come to class with the assigned edition.

About the Editor: Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830 (2013).

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to English parents, in 1667. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, he was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1795 and later served for more than three decades as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In 1704, he published the religious-themed A Tale of a Tub, the first of the trenchantly satirical works on which his reputation rests. Along with his friends Alexander Pope and John Gay, Swift helped make the eighteenth century a golden age of social and political satire in Britain. After a brief stint as a Tory pamphleteer in London, the self-styled Irish patriot returned to Dublin in 1714. In later years, he vented what he called his “savage indignation” in a wide range of literary registers, from the Rabelaisian humor of his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), to the dystopian vision of infanticide in A Modest Proposal (1729). He died in 1745.

Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee in Scotland. After completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge, he held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Bristol, a Visiting Professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and library fellowships at Harvard and Yale. He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013).