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from Part III - Literary Background
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
From the start of his career, Jonathan Swift was caught up in debates about the relative value of ancient and modern cultures. Swift’s first masterpieces, ‘The Battel of the Books’ and A Tale of a Tub (both pub. 1704), were brilliant satirical interventions on the side of ancient cultures against the moderns. This chapter unpicks the density of allusion in these works, explaining how they relate to the broader ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and moderns. A final section traces the legacy of this dispute in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift invokes ancient Sparta as a model for social integrity.
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