A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

Harold Bloom says that A Tale of a Tub «is one of the handful of totally original works in the language.» This new edition presents the work as «an amazing comic book» which puts it in a class with Rabelais’ Pantagruel . Both of these works became banned books, greatly increasing the sales. In this edition for the first time the Narrator of the text is discovered to be an authentic comic-pathetic character, with cropped ears, ill-cured syphilis, and suicidal impulses, waiting to be admitted to Bedlam, the new insane asylum, as a terminal patient. This edition is also the first to recognize that the text of A Tale of a Tub is a mosaic, composed of quotations from other texts, which incidentally accounts for the necessity of many end notes.