This collection of critical thinking situates the satire of Jonathan Swift within both its eighteenth-century contexts and our modern anxieties about personal identity and communication. The critics chosen for this volume demonstrate the complexity of Swift’s work. Its four sections explore matters of authorial identity, the relation between Swift’s writing and its historical context, the full range of his comments on gender, and his deployment of metaphor and irony to engage the reader. The theoretical perspectives of the contributors are lucidly explained and their critical terms located in the wider contexts of contemporary theory in the introduction and headnotes.