Customer Reviews

The Writings of Jonathan Swift (Norton Critical Edition)

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This anthology will serve those who don't care about the information that footnotes would provide, and those who already have that information in thier heads.

For students who want to give Swift a serious and informed reading, this edition is not ideal. Footnotes are few, and there's little editorial help in navigating the complex historical, political, and religious issues relevant to the text. Without an understanding of those issues the many of the works included are largely unintelligable and therefore a lot less interesting. For the price of a Norton, one expects a bit more padding to come with the text.

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.