This book offers an accessible, single-volume introduction to a wider range of Jonathan Swift's writing than is usually covered in such treatments of him. Primarily a work of biographically-inflected literary criticism, it draws on insights furnished by feminist and postcolonial literary theories when those are relevant. Its portrait of this charismatic writer confronts the complexities in character, style, and rhetorical posture that make him enduring and important. Swift is situated as a career-clergyman rather than an imaginative writer, whose ecclesiastical politics, geographical and national situation in Ireland, and obliquities of temperament made him the challenging writer he was. Commencing with an account of the domestic and foreign contexts in which Swift's life was rooted, the book provides a chronological account of that life, putting appropriate emphasis on its controversial and contested nature. His writing is examined chronologically, progressing through his early writi