earticle

영어

This paper studies the most controversial question the critics of Swift have long disagreed about: who is the speaker in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and some odes, and argues that the question both gives all the complexities and subtleties of Swift’s satiric outlook and has a pivotal importance for readers to understand his satires. To answer the question this paper examines first the speaker of Swift’s early odes and then their relation to the satiric persona of A Tale of a Tub, because the early transition period from the writer of the early odes to the period of the prose satirist is believed to reveal the process in which the question forms itself in Swift’s mind and begins to become a creative foundation of his satire.