"The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is the first fully annotated scholarly edition ever undertaken of Swift's complete works in both verse and prose. The great editions of
Swift by Herbert Davis and Harold Williams have remained standard for over half a century. We are all greatly indebted to them, but the time has come to replace or revise their texts and
commentary in the light of subsequent historical, biographical and textual knowledge. Davis's sixteen-volume edition of the Prose Writings offered valuable introductions but no annotation. The
commentary to his separate edition of The Drapier's Letters, and Williams's commentaries to the Poems and Journal to Stella, though excellent in their time, must now be supplemented by a
considerable body of more recent scholarship. The Cambridge Edition's detailed introductions, notes and appendices aim to provide an informed understanding of Swift's place in the political and
cultural history of England and Ireland, and to establish the historical, literary and bibliographical contexts of his immense achievement as a prose satirist, poet and political writer. The
editors of individual volumes include distinguished historians, as well as leading scholars of eighteenth-century literature. For the Cambridge Edition, Swift's texts will be collate"--
