Recommendations
Books Like A Tale of a Tub
Best books to read after A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
Readers who love A Tale of a Tub — Swift's radical prose satire on religious enthusiasm, hack writing, and the vanity of modern learning — will enjoy these masterworks of English satirical prose, the mock-heroic tradition, and the great eighteenth-century literature of ideas.
- 1
Buy on AmazonGulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift's masterpiece and the most accessible of his major satires — after the radical formal experiments of A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels shows Swift's satirical method fully matured and deployed in an adventure narrative that reaches from Lilliput to the land of the Houyhnhnms.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Battle of the Books
by Jonathan Swift
The companion piece published with A Tale of a Tub — Swift's prose satire on the controversy between the Ancients (who believed classical literature was superior) and the Moderns (who believed modern writing was better) is shorter, funnier, and more accessible than the Tale itself.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Dunciad in Four Books
by Alexander Pope
The companion satire from Swift's friend Pope — The Dunciad attacks the hack writers of Grub Street with the same ferocity as A Tale of a Tub but in verse; the two works together define the Scriblerian satire on modern literary culture.
- 4
Buy on AmazonDon Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The great original of the prose satire on a character made deluded by reading — Cervantes's influence on Swift (and on the whole tradition of the novel as satirical form) is immeasurable; A Tale of a Tub's mad narrator is a descendant of Don Quixote's learned folly.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
The novel that most fully inherited Swift's formal innovations — Sterne's digressive, self-undermining, footnote-obsessed narrator in Tristram Shandy is a direct descendant of the mad modern author of A Tale of a Tub; the most formally experimental novel of the eighteenth century.
- 6
Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The companion satirical prose masterpiece from the Continent — Voltaire's satire on Leibnizian optimism is as radical in its targets and as economical in its method as Swift; the two together are the great satirical prose works of the eighteenth century.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton
The great learned prose encyclopaedia that precedes and influences A Tale of a Tub — Burton's digressive, citation-laden, comic survey of melancholy is the model for Swift's mock-scholarly apparatus; reading Burton shows where Swift's satire on erudition comes from.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus
by Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, et al.
The collaborative Scriblerian project that grew out of Swift's and Pope's friendship — the satirical memoirs of a pedantic virtuoso who has devoted his life to learning everything useless; the closest companion to A Tale of a Tub in the tradition of learned satire.
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