Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Theoretical orientations
- 2 Restoration enterprises and their rhetorics
- 3 Parody and the play of stigma in pamphlet warfare
- 4 The problem of anarchic parody: An Argument against Abolishing Christianity
- 5 Authority and the author: the disappearing centre in Swiftian parody
- 6 Entrance to A Tale of A Tub
- 7 A Tale of A Tub as an orphaned text
- 8 A Tale of A Tub as Swift's own illegitimate issue
- Conclusion: parodic disguise and the negotiability of A Tale of A Tub
- Select bibliography
- Index
7 - A Tale of A Tub as an orphaned text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Theoretical orientations
- 2 Restoration enterprises and their rhetorics
- 3 Parody and the play of stigma in pamphlet warfare
- 4 The problem of anarchic parody: An Argument against Abolishing Christianity
- 5 Authority and the author: the disappearing centre in Swiftian parody
- 6 Entrance to A Tale of A Tub
- 7 A Tale of A Tub as an orphaned text
- 8 A Tale of A Tub as Swift's own illegitimate issue
- Conclusion: parodic disguise and the negotiability of A Tale of A Tub
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
At length we agreed upon this Expedient; That when a Customer comes for one of these, and desires in Confidence to know the Author; he will tell him very privately, as a Friend, naming which ever of the Wits shall happen to be that Week in the Vogue; and if Durfy's last Play should be in Course, I had as lieve he may be the Person as Congreve.
(p. 207)It is suggested in the ‘Introduction’ that ‘Books [are] the Children of the Brain’ (p. 71), and here the author renounces paternity of his book. He authorises the bookseller to father it indiscriminately, and purely for mercenary reasons, on whomever fashion most favours, be he a hack (Durfey) or a genius (Congreve). The book is orphaned, disowned by its proud but servile author, cut off from its origin, and sent seeking filiation into the world. Set loose in a culture orphaned from seminal origins of legitimacy by the wilfullness of its recent history, the orphaned text generates myths of origin and authenticity in a frantic attempt to claim or forge a legitimacy to which it has no natural claim. In A Tale's parodic sphere, lines of authority have always already been subverted and the origin has always already been irrecoverably displaced. Authoritative utterance is impossible, and the wit and motion is the sound of the book-bastard's attempt to mock up the impression that it has a right to exist.
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- Information
- Swift's Parody , pp. 140 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995