The Writings of Jonathan Swift (Norton Critical Edition)

This volume contains the complete and definitive texts of virtually all of Swift's major works, as well as a generous selection of his poetry and other writings.

Included are Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The Battel of the Books, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, numerous essays and other prose pieces, and poems, among them several that are rarely reprinted. All of the texts are scrupulously edited and annotated.

Backgrounds includes correspondence between Swift and members of his circle and observations by his contemporaries.

Criticism offers evaluations by Norman O. Brown, Samuel Holt Monk, Allan Bloom, Nigel Dennis, Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr., A. E. Dyson, William Frost, C. J. Rawson, Kathleen Williams, Martin Price, Robert M. Adams, and Jay Arnold Levine.

An Annotated Bibliography guides the reader to important works for further study.

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.

Robert A. Greenberg was Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, and taught at Cornell and New York University. He was co-author of Robert Frost: An Introduction and Modern Essays: A Rhetorical Approach, and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Gulliver's Travels.


William B. Piper is Professor Emeritus of English at Rice University. He has taught at Cornell University, the University of Louisville, and Western Reserve University. He has published Laurence Sterne, The Heroic Couplet, The Literature of Common Sense, and many scholarly articles.