Included are <em>Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The Battel of theBooks, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit</em>,numerous essays and other prose pieces, and poems, among them severalthat are rarely reprinted. All of the texts are scrupulously edited andannotated.<br /><br />Backgrounds includes correspondence between Swift and members of hiscircle and observations by his contemporaries.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />An Annotated Bibliography guides the reader to important works forfurther study.