Gulliver's Travels

It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations.

“Contexts” collects materials that influenced Swift’s writing of the novel, as well as documents that suggest its initial reception, including Swift’s correspondence, Alexander Pope’s poems on Gulliver’s Travels, and relevant passages from Gargantua and Pantagruel.

“Criticism” includes fourteen assessments of Gulliver’s Travels by the Earl of Orrery, Sir Walter Scott, Pat Rogers, Michael McKen, J.A. Downie, J. Paul Hunter, Laura Brown, Douglas Lane Patey, Dennis Todd, Richard H. Rodino. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Janine Barchas, Claude Rawson, and Howard D. Weinbrot.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

Author Biography

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. Albert J. Rivero is Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. He has published widely on the literature of the British long eighteenth century. His most recent publication is Daniel Defoe in Context (coedited with George Justice). He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders.