The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift

Contexts features a generous selection of contemporary materials, among them Swift's letters, autobiographical documents, and personal writings. Criticism provides readers with a wide chronological and thematic range of scholarly interpretations, divided into two sections. The first, 17451940, includes assessments by Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, F. R. Leavis, and Andr Breton, among others. The second, After 1940, is by subject and collects critical discussions of A Tale of the Tub, the poems, the English and Irish politics, and Gullivers Travels, by Hugh Kenner, Marcus Walsh, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Penelope Wilson, Derek Mahon, S. J. Connolly, George Orwell, R. S. Crane, Jenny Mezciems, Ian Higgins, and Claude Rawson. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.