Swift, Satire, and the Novel

This chapter explores Jonathan Swift's role in the evolution of a form of novel that did not yet exist in his own day. It is a form priding itself on immediacy of reporting, a rhetoric of intensive confessional exploration, and a sense that the process of writing itself is part of the self-disclosure. Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704), while not properly a novel, had a shaping influence on the history of fiction, as well as being the product or by-product of a popular culture, and book-trade practices, which provided a foundation for the evolution of the novel. Swift's speaker, dedicating his book to Prince Posterity, boasts ‘that what I am going to say is literally true this Minute I am writing’. He adds in his Preface that his aim is to achieve ‘a Parity and strict Correspondence of Idea's between the Reader and the Author’.