Jonathan Swift and 'A Tale of a Tub'
Jonathan Swift's Tale of the Tub is a brilliant failure. It is a prose satire intended as a defence of the Anglican church, but it was widely interpreted by contemporary readers as an attack on all religion. At the time of writing it, Swift was a junior Anglican clergyman hoping for substantial preferment in the Church. The appearance of the Tale , and its assumed message, was a serious obstacle to his promotion. One of the things that makes the Tale difficult to interpret for that the work attacks multiple things of things at the same time: it's an allegory about religious differences; it's a satire on pedantry and false scholarship; it's a parody of the contemporary book trade; it has attached to it two further treatises, the 'Battle of the Books', and the 'Mechanical Operation of the Spirit'. This essay will examine notions of authorship, intertextuality, originality, and the relationship between parody and allegory, and try to det