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Tale of a Tub & Other Works
 
 
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Tale of a Tub & Other Works (Hardcover)

by Jonathan Swift (Author) "The Author's Apology.-The tale approved of by a great majority among the men of taste ..." (more)
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Product Description

Product Description

This volume contains the three works which together make up Jonathan Swift's early satiric and intellectual masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub: the Tale itself, The Battel of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Incorporating much new knowledge, this edition provides the first full scholarly treatment of this important work for fifty years. The introduction discusses publication, composition, and authorship; sources, analogues and generic models; reception; and religious, scientific and literary contexts (including the ancients and moderns controversy). Detailed explanatory notes address many previously unexplained issues in this famously rich and difficult work. Texts have been fully collated and edited according to modern principles and are accompanied with a textual introduction and full textual apparatus. Illustrations include title pages, the eight engravings from the fifth edition, and original designs for these engravings. Extensive associated contemporary materials, including Edmund Curll's Key and William Wotton's Observations, are provided.


About the Author

Marcus Walsh is Kenneth Allott Professor of Literature at the University of Liverpool.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The most elusive of great books, April 24 2000
By "lexo-2x" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Paperback)
A Tale of a Tub is certainly Swift's least classifiable work. He's best known, of course, for Gulliver's Travels. This work was mostly written at the very start of his career, when he hadn't yet totally hardened into his later misanthropy, and it has all the demented exuberance of a great writer in his mid-20s finding a voice.

It defies description. The kernel of it is a satire on religious controversies, but that makes up about a third of the actual text. The rest is a series of prologues, forewords, dedications, prefaces, afterwords, epilogues and appendices, the sheer profusion of which suggest very much that Swift is poking dire fun at the idea of writing itself. In that respect, it goes further than any 20th century French golden boy of artistic revolt; Artaud looks like a stamped-in-tin romantic poet when set against Swift's manic nihilism. A Tale of a Tub is the closest anyone has ever got to writing a book that tackles head-on the futility of writing books, but that's only one interpretation of it. It exhausts interpretation by being as near as possible about nothing at all - and hence about everything. Plus it's not even 200 pages long. Swift never wrote as irresponsibly ever again, although the Travels, 'A Modest Proposal', the Bickerstaffe Papers, the 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' and the Drapier's Letters are all admirable enough. A Tale of a Tub is as comprehensive a piece of literary terrorism as was ever attempted.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Damagingly Funny, Mar 27 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Paperback)
Swift, the greatest English satirist, is of course best known for Gulliver's Travels, but the Tale of a Tub is more complex, more vicious, and funnier. In some of the best prose of the 18th century, he ridicules all sorts of conventions, religious, literary, rhetorical, and otherwise. He makes full use of the capacity that prose has for being deliriously irrelevant and digressive. It is similar in some ways to Tristram Shandy and the novels of postmodernism. It'll give you fits.
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