This chapter explores the uneasy relationship between Gulliver’s Travels and scholarship on the development of the English novel during the eighteenth century. The chapter argues that to approach the miscellaneous Gulliver’s Travels with a rigid and absolute conception of genre is to overlook Swift’s engagement with a range of new and old fictional modes. Placing Swift in context means recognising the doubtful applicability to Gulliver of retrospectively formulated assumptions about the novel, including consistency of character. The final section of the chapter looks beyond Gulliver to consider the novelistic qualities of A Tale of a Tub and the lesser-known Memoirs of Capt. John Creichton.