"The Journal to Stella offers a detailed commentary on Swift's experiences in London in the last years of Queen Anne's reign, and substantial evidence of his evolving relationship with Esther Johnson, or Stella. This new edition seeks for the first time both to situate the text alongside Swift's other works, and to draw on recent scholarship on the period to offer commentary and annotation, which will place it within its original political, historical and cultural contexts. It offers transcriptions of the manuscript portion of the letters, based on the latest digital image analysis techniques. These will represent the text for the first time, complete with his purposeful obliterations. In addition to a new critical introduction and appendices, there is also a biographical appendix derived from recently available resources from the History of Parliament, Irish History of Parliament and ODNB projects"--

"The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is the first fully annotated scholarly edition ever undertaken of Swift's complete works in both verse and prose. The great editions of Swift by Herbert Davis and Harold Williams have remained standard for over half a century. We are all greatly indebted to them, but the time has come to replace or revise their texts and commentary in the light of subsequent historical, biographical and textual knowledge. Davis's sixteen-volume edition of the Prose Writings offered valuable introductions but no annotation. The commentary to his separate edition of The Drapier's Letters, and Williams's commentaries to the Poems and Journal to Stella, though excellent in their time, must now be supplemented by a considerable body of more recent scholarship. The Cambridge Edition's detailed introductions, notes and appendices aim to provide an informed understanding of Swift's place in the political and cultural history of England and Ireland, and to establish the historical, literary and bibliographical contexts of his immense achievement as a prose satirist, poet and political writer. The editors of individual volumes include distinguished historians, as well as leading scholars of eighteenth-century literature. For the Cambridge Edition, Swift's texts will be collate"--