Abstract
Published in 1704 along with A Tale of a Tub and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, The Battle of the Books joins those satires in addressing the ongoing Ancients-Moderns Controversy. The Battle of the Books is a straightforward allegory in which, at one point, a scurrilous spider, representing the Moderns, verbally assaults the obviously favored bee. The distinctions between the two—e.g., utter self-dependence vs. wide-ranging exploration—establish valuable but often underappreciated links with the other satires published with The Battle of the Books, form the basis of the age-old and perennial conflict, and represent the satirist’s understanding of the issues at stake.
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Notes
Jonathan Swift, “Gulliver’s Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa. (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 365. Because of its convenience and accessibility, I have cited this edition wherever possible.
Jonathan Swift, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in “A Tale of a Tub” and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 141.
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). Introduction—The Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and The Battle of the Books. In: Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45699-4
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