A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Oxford World's Classics)

Angus Ross is one of the top people in Augustan prose studies, and his annotations for this edition are well done. For college students and those with college educations who are reading A Tale of a Tub and its associated works, the introduction and appended works are sufficient to give an overview. The Tale is an "impossible" work, and giving any student a complete review is impossible, as it is a work that opens every category of question, every matter of philosophy, religion, history, and rhetoric, and Ross splits the difference admirably. This annotations sometimes explain the self-evident, but he rarely misses a vital spot that needs explanation. On the other hand, the annotations are all in end note format, and so students and readers who are unfamiliar with Augustan history and the literary context of the work have to continually flip back and forth to "get the jokes." Simply moving to real footnotes would make an enormous difference for readers (e.g. the 1920 and 1958 Oxford UP standard editions edited by Guthkelch and Smith).The other works in the volume are a nicely eclectic selection. The W. W. Norton Selected Works of Swift is better at giving the author's range, but Ross picks well and gives a nice representation here. The effect is to not only fully situate the Tale (even giving space to the silly Thomas Swift), but to give a snapshot of early Swift.For anyone teaching, or teaching him or herself, this greatest of Swift's prose satires, this is far and away the best, affordable edition.

A renowned critic suggested it may be,(after Shakespeare) the best prose in the language. That got my attention. It is indeed brilliant and scathing. It is also timeless. He compares Catholicism, Anglicanism and Calvinism. He calls his characters Peter {for St. Peter representing Catholicism}, Martin (for Martin Luther...representing Anglicanism) and Jack (for John Calvin representing Calvinism). As Swift was an Anglican clergyman, his sentiments obviously resided there. His over all message is an attack on dogmatism. Modern day fanatics could benefit by reading this piece.

Until a better edition is available, this literally scanned copy of an old library book (with a random reader's occasional words copied in the margins--no joke) will have to do. The Tale of the Tub: breath-takingly powerful writing, hilarious and yet will set any reader down a few pegs by satirizing some of our most common points of pride. Harold Bloom reads it once a year, apparently. I probably will too.

Jonathan Swift's best work of satire. Enough said.

When Harold Bloom was asked which books he returns to most often, Bloom said:"I re-read Jonathan Swift's A Tale of the Tub twice a year, but that's to punish myself. It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictive prose in the English language, but it's a kind of vehement satire upon visionary projectors as it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and corrective for me."In The Western Canon, Bloom says:"Tale of a Tub has always impressed me as the best prose in the English Language after Shakespeare's"These comments drew me to A Tale of a Tub and I was not disappointed. The hilarity flows and never grows repetitive or dull. No part drags. I highly recommend this edition because the notes are very helpful.

Given the state of the world's politics and the unfavorable impact they have on the common man in so many countries, I frequently speculate about what Swift might have to say today.

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.