Books: Gulliver in Context

THE PORTABLE SWIFT (601 pp.)—Edited by Carl Van Doren—Viking ($2).

The world of Lemuel Gulliver is one of the permanent and self-contained creations of literature. But it has a context, and the context enriches it. In reprinting Gulliver's Travels entire for this "portable" edition, Editor Van Doren has surrounded it with earlier and later examples of the prose of Jonathan Swift—a prose that for polished, deadly decorum and energy in satire no writer has ever equaled. Van Doren's introduction also supplies the chief facts about the battles —literary and political—in which Swift fought with...