Chapter 19 - Fables and Fantasy

Summary

Unlike his friend John Gay, Swift never wrote a collection of fables. Instead, fables and the fabulous are often found buried within other genres and kinds of writing: in the scuffling spider and bee of The Battel of the Books, for instance, and in his satiric verses and in tongue-in-cheek curiosities like A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick. This chapter begins with a section on the circulation and perception of fables during Swift’s lifetime, before turning to Swift’s distortions of this genre. The final part of the chapter zooms in on Gulliver’s Travels and finds a version of Aesop in the repulsive Yahoos of Part Four.