Abstract
Another previously unnoticed context for the great, enigmatic satire A Tale of a Tub is the development of the modern essay, deriving from Montaigne at the end of the sixteenth century: autobiographical, personal, reflective, skeptical—its focus, the self observed. The main speaker of the Tale, a modern Hack writer, planning to write upon Nothing, recalls both the spider of The Battle of the Books and a (not-altogether accurate) representation of the essayist, engaged in “home-cosmography.” The great satire “A Modest Proposal” (1729) helps to elucidate the issues entailed, for, although often nowadays labeled as an essay, it is a satire whose directions clash with the essay’s.
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Notes
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in “Gulliver’s Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 276–77.
Samuel Johnson, The Tale of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (New York: Oxford UP, 2009).
Sir William Habington, qtd. in Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1947), 559.
Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 187–204;
Annie Dillard, The WritingLife (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 65.
Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), xi.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980), 49.
Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 121.
John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford UP, 1962).
Donald Greene, The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth Century English Literature (New York: Random House, 1970).
Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing & Kindred Subjects (London: Methuen, 1908), ix.
Hilaire Belloc, One Thing and Another: A Miscellany from His Uncollected Essays, ed. Patrick Cahill (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), 11.
John Henry Newman, qtd. in Christopher Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933), 106.
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and “A Modest Proposal”. In: Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311047_4
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