The voyages of an eighteenth-century Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, where people are six inches tall, and Brobdingnag, a land peopled by giants.

Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself in Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose six-inch height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour.
Although Gulliver's journeys take us to strange and wonderful places, it is impossible to ignore the reflections of ourselves with which Swift peoples his realms, where humankind is seen in a satirical hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species. With its wild distortions, optical illusions and undertones of madness and the grotesque, Gulliver's Travels defies our expectations of a conventional traveller's tale. It is in fact a brillantly and rudelly subversive book.

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Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) has been generally acknowledged as the greatest English satirist. In a prodigious stream of letters, pamphlets, tales, and essays, he assailed, with irony, erudition, and savage wit, several of the abuses and vices he saw around him, including political corruption, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and the decline of learning. These selections from Swift's greatest writings include some of his best-known pieces against organized religion and the English oppression of Ireland: "A Tale of a Tub"; "A Tritical Essay"; "A Meditation upon a Broomstick"; "Thoughts on Various Subjects"; "An Argument against Abolishing Christianity in England"; "A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit"; Drapier letters nos. 1 and 4; "On Political Lying"; "A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club"; and "A Modest Proposal."

Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself in Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose six-inch height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour.

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

Backgrounds includes correspondence between Swift and members of hiscircle 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 forfurther study.