Since the first secret publication, in 1740, of part of his correspondence with Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift's letters have become a standard source for his biographers and critics. Craig Ulman argues that the letters are not entirely reliable for biographical fact and have often been taken too literally. In this readable essay, Ulman surveys the satiric material in Swift's correspondence, highlighting his wit. The author views Swift's epistolary writing as very much a literary endeavor. He examines the pose and the persona and discusses the satiric methods the letters share with Swift's other published works.

The critical implications of this fact are the subject of Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist. Against the current tendency to stress the relationship between the work and the life of the man or his age, J.-P. Forster explores the parodic devices and other fictional patterns by means of which the satirist produces his biting vision of man as a social and political animal. He argues that it is these fictional devices that enable Swift to construct his uncanny satirical reference to reality and to produce satirical effects that irony and rhetoric could never achieve by themselves. The book highlights the inventiveness of the satirist and his skill at manipulating the reader's expectations. It presents Swift as a man of the Age of Reason ever ready to call the imagination to the rescue of common sense.

Much has been written on Swift and his principal satires. But one aspect of his art has received surprisingly little attention, namely his satirical deployment of fictions, which more than anything else endeared him to early readers. The critical implications of this fact are the subject of Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist. Against the current tendency to stress the relationship between the work and the life of the man or his age, J.-P. Forster explores how the great Augustan satirist uses various simple fictional devices to produce effects which lend his satires a subtlety that irony and rhetoric could never achieve by themselves. He argues that it is these fictional devices that have allowed his satires to survive the test of time. A close examination of the well-known and not so well-known satires demonstrates that Swift's constant concern with the relationship of text to reader played a crucial role in his choice and handling of fiction. It also suggests that his conception of imagination, more important to an understanding of his work than generally assumed, is as problematic as his conception of reason.