Jonathan Swift Battle of Books Summary

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Jonathan Swift's contributions to the debate are most evident in his satirical "Battle of the Books," which recounts, in a pseudo-manuscript format that parodies the state of real ancient manuscripts, an actual epic battle between the volumes in Bentley's library at St. James's. Swift's own sympathies are unquestionably with the Ancients, and many a Modern author, including John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and Aphra Behn, is bested by a classical combatant. At the climax of the battle, Bentley and Wotton themselves are vanquished by Boyle, imagined as an "auxillary" of the Ancients. Swift's narrative is playful and light, and he takes the opportunity to settle many personal scores against near contemporaries like Dryden, but he also manages, along the way, to expose many of the more subtle dimensions and implications of the debate in which he is engaged. The Battle of the Ancients and Moderns was not, in fact, merely about whether the Ancients produced "better" authors and philosophers than the Moderns; it was more fundamentally about how "History" itself functioned and should be read, and about the relationships between past and present, humanity and nature, and human understanding and knowledge. The plate illustrated here is one of 8 new plates (only one of which is accompanies the "Battle of the Books") included with the fifth edition ofA Tale of a Tub (1710): it was designed, apparently, under the direction of the art critic Sir Andrew Fountaine and engraved by Bernard Lens and John Sturt, who ran a drawing-school at St. Paul's Churchyard. All are reproduced, along with the original designs by Fountaine, in Guthkelch and Nichol Smith's 1920 edition of A Tale. The engravings, it should be noted, are not especially apt representations of Swift's narrative, and there is no evidence that he had any hand in their design (although he was aware that they were being
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