The Writings of Jonathan Swift: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism,

by Jonathan Swift and William (editor) Swift, Jonathan; Greenberg, Robert A. (editor); Piper

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393042839
• ISBN13: 9780393042832
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 721 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

durn good

this 'un makes durn good reading and it has durn good illustrations too, like mom used to say, real knee slappers, not like them other so called yankee editions.

A very thorough collection

In contrast with the principal competing collection of Swift's work (i.e., the Oxford Classics collection), the Norton Critical Edition contains all of "Gulliver's Travels," "A Tale of a Tub" (my favorite of Swift's works), and "The Battle of the Books," along with a solid selection of other writings in prose and poetry. Given the breadth of the selection, it is not surprising that this edition does not have an extensive critical apparatus. But it does have enough background material and footnotes to make the texts generally useful to the modern reader, and other materials are readily available. This may be more of a "reader's edition" than a truly "critical edition," but it is still a valuable edition.