As the greatest satirist in the English language, Jonathan Swift was both admired and feared in his own time for the power of his writing and hugely influential on writers who followed him.

This collection of essays, with its distinguished list of international contributors, centers on Swift, the genres and authors who influenced him, and his impact on satire and satirists from his own time to the twentieth century. Swift transformed models such as utopian writing, political pamphleteering, and social critique with his dark and uncompromising vision of the human condition, deepening the outlook of contemporaries such as Alexander Pope, and leaving a legacy of Swiftian satire in the work of Hogarth, Fielding, Austen and Beckett, among others.