One of the major problems for readers and students of A Tale of a Tub is its apparent lack of internal unity and coherence. Faced with a welter of seemingly contradictory and inconsistent arguments and attitudes, reader and student alike have frequently been forced to concede defeat and turn to Swift's "more profitable" works for consolation. The purpose of the present study has been to indicate the existence, in the Tale, of numerous unifying devices, a recognition of which may enable the reader to perceive and appreciate the essential unity and coherence of an admittedly complex literary entity. Emphasis has been primarily upon the "dramatic impact" of the Tale, and the contribution of images and themes to this impact. Classification of images and themes has been made in terms of the definitions offered in the text. Persuasive oratory is the instrument to achievement in the Tubbian world, and it is with the motives and methods of Tubbian orators that the study is primarily concerned. The pervasive themes of the mechanical operation of the spirit and madness are among the unifying devices in the Tale. The first seven chapters are devoted to an exploration of images, devices, and thematic developments as unifying devices. Four subsequent chapters discuss the relationships between elements in the Tale and certain of the cultural dissentions of which these elements provide reflections. There has been no attempt at inclusiveness in the selection of representative cultural elements. Rather, in the selection of materials from Hobbes, Dryden, Wycherley, Sprat, the Cambridge Platonists, Glanvill, and Shaftesbury, the attempt has been only to indicate the major preoccupations of the age. Where obvious similarities exist between attitudes, as they do between the attitudes of Hobbes and those of the scientific virtuosi, the emphasis is upon Swift's capacity to make fine distinctions between similar attitudes and to indicate these distinctions in his methods of attack. Conversely, the inclusion of apparently disparate "philosophies," such as those of Hobbes and Shaftesbury, is intended to demonstrate Swift's ability to comprehend in one attack a great variety of disparate attitudes. It has been found necessary, in the interests of clarity, to include a certain amount of explanation and elaboration of materials relative to the cultural background. The conclusion of the study is primarily concerned with the reader's reaction to the "dramatic impact" of the Tale. Certain of Swift's "satiric criteria" or norms are tentatively offered for consideration. These are such as may be readily available to the reader from a careful examination of the text and an exploration of his own reaction to the text. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

<p> The core of Swift's Tale of a Tub is an allegorical narrative that recounts in miniature the history of the Christian Church. ln the tailorworship and Aeolist sections of his account, however, Swift temporarily suspends the narrative and describes a comprehensive systems of belief founded in each case on a single, all-important but absurd principle: the tailor-worshippers venerate clothes and the Aeolists, wind. This shift in technique is an important indication of Swift's aim in the Tale. Despite their essentially digressive nature, these two sections haves a close relation to the narrative and are obviously intended to comment on it. The most useful approach to an understanding of this shift of technique is by reference to the genre known as the padoxical enconium which was ideally suited for a satirical treatment of the philosophical issues that Swift was dealing with in the Tale. </p> <p> Swift's main target in the Tale is generally acknowledged to be 'modernism.' The combined evidence of the Tale, The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit shows that Swift visualized the ancients-moderns controversy less as a contest between the merits of the learning of two different epochs far removed in time than as an eternally recurring struggle between a philosophic casr of thought (modernism) that would more accurately be called 'progressive rationalism' and the traditional Christian humanism to which Swift himself gave allegiance. Swift's main objection to modernism was that it tended to promote fashionable ideas to an importance far above their worth merely on grounds of novelty, to the detriment of what is of permanent value in human affairs. The typical modern reduction of experience to a naively simple scheme is the central is the central preoccupation of the 'Digression of Madness'. </p> <p> In order to refute not just individual modern thinkers but modernism in general, Swift turned the paradoxical econium into a brilliant burlesque device. Because it characteristically elevates to a position of importance something generally considered base or insignificant, the paradoxical enconium is a humorous, far-fetched counterpart to the kind of reductive logic that modernism attempts in all seriousness. The tailor-worship system is at once a paradoxical enconium of clothes and a modern philosophical system. At the same time, since it has no direct historical equivalent, the tailor-worship stands outside time as a permanent diagnosis of all such kinds of thinking. Both the Aoelist and tailor-worship systems are timeless paradigms of reductive thought that transcend the historical limitations of the examples they parody. For purpose of constructing such paradigms the paradoxical encomium was ideally adapted in a way that the allegorical narrative, with its point-forpoint correspondence with historical events, was not. </p> <p> Swift makes further use of the paradoxical encomium in the 'Digression on Madness', in which he humourously places the most reductive thinkers of history within a reductive framework of his own devising. At the centre of this digression, however, he presents a more engaging paradox: in the most famous passage of the Tale he contrives to prove the superiority of credulity to both reason and the abuse of reason. The terms in which he does so are more than just a practical example of the dangers of rhetoric: they are an inverted restatement of the terms of the ancients-moderns controversy, a warning that modernism at its most extreme is truly insane, and an implicit vindiciation of the values of Christian humanism. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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The similarities between Swift's Grub Street Hack and Sterne's Tristram are persistent and remarkable, even though the Hack is a satiric pose of Swift and Tristram a comic projection of Sterne. Perhaps the most striking similarity lies in the constant tension between the reader's expectations of a wise narrator and a sequential style and the Hack's and Tristram's perverse frustration of the reader's desire for order. The foolish narrators, in an obstructive style, develop systematic theories based on absurd hypotheses. This perversity is not only witty and amusing, but also a reflection of Swift's and Sterne's eighteenth century “rage for order." To Swift, order is a necessity, to be defended by attacking all that threatens order. Swift imitates the chaos he saw in seventeenth-century style and thought by assuming the mask of a fool who speaks in the accents of hundreds of modern pretenders to learning. But the seeming chaos of the Hack's discourse is ordered by Swift's satiric intent and his views on Gnosticism. In the end, comic order predominates as the quintessence of disorder, the Hack is laughed off the stage. Wit triumphs over dulness. However, the comedy is undermined by tragic associations of evil, madness, and anarchy. To Sterne, conventional order of time and formal logic are illusions. He imitates the disorder in men's minds by assuming a mask and playing many parts. The seeming chaos of Tristram's narration is ordered by the association of ideas, a central group of characters, and the values of humour, common sense, feeling and benevolence. In the end, in spite of suggestions of the world's ill nature, hypocrisy, and corruption, comic order predominates. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text