The Battle of the Books. Title page of the first edition. The Battle of the Books is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1. It depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library (housed in St.
James's Palace at the time of the writing), as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy. Because of the satire, .
The Chronicles of Narnia Soundtrack: The Battle Composed by Harry Gregson-Williams.
In his opinion, modern man saw farther than the ancients ever could. His essay introduced two metaphors to the debate that would be reused by later authors. First, he proposed that modern man was just a dwarf standing upon the . They possessed a clear view of nature, and modern man only reflected/refined their vision.
These metaphors, of the dwarf/giant and the reflecting/emanative light, would show up in Swift's satire and others. Temple's essay was answered by Richard Bentley, the classicist and William Wotton, the critic. Temple's friends/clients, sometimes known as the .
The debate in England lasted only for a few years. William Temple was by that point a retired minister, the Secretary of State for Charles II who had conducted peace negotiations with France. As a minister, it was beneath his station to answer common and professional (known then as . Notably, Jonathan Swift was not among the participants, though he was working as Temple's secretary. Therefore, it is likely that the quarrel was more of a spur to Swift's imagination than a debate that he felt inclined to enter. The satire. From its first publication, Swift added a short satire entitled .
In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in a library when various books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and ancients. In Swift's satire, he skilfully manages to avoid saying which way victory fell. He portrays the manuscript as having been damaged in places, thus leaving the end of the battle up to the reader.
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The battle is told with great detail to particular authors jousting with their replacements and critics. The battle is not just between Classical authors and modern authors, but also between authors and critics. The prose is a parody of heroic poetry along the lines of Samuel Butler's parody of battle in Hudibras. The combat in the . The spider curses the bee for clumsiness and for wrecking the work of one who is his better. The spider says that his web is his home, a stately manor, while the bee is a vagrant who goes anywhere in nature without any concern for reputation. The bee answers that he is doing the bidding of nature, aiding in the fields, while the spider's castle is merely what was drawn from its own body, which has .
However, it also illustrates the theme of the whole work. The bee is like the ancients and like authors: it gathers its materials from nature and sings its drone song in the fields. The spider is like the moderns and like critics: it kills the weak and then spins its web (books of criticism) from the taint of its own body digesting the viscera. In one sense, the Battle of the Books illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one's own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative works.
One of the attacks in the Tale was on those who believe that being readers of works makes them the equals of the creators of works. The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, . Instead, it was an English work based on the same premise. However, John Ozell attempted to answer Swift with his translation of Le Lutrin, where the battle sees Tory authors skewered by Whigs. This prompted a satire of Ozell by Swift and by Alexander Pope. Often, these were merely political attacks, as in the later Battel of the Poets (1.
Edward Cooke), which was an attack on Alexander Pope. As a set piece or topos of 1. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2.