ABSTRACT
A Tale of a Tub focuses on the relation of author and reader, insisting on the former's authority and pointing to the dangers when the reader 'usurps' that authority. The passages from throughout A Tale of a Tub illustrate a number of its characteristic features, including its complexity and sophistication and its central thematic concern with reading and interpretation. Still, by means of close attention to both its declaration and its description of author-reader relations, the author argues that the Tale is precisely an allegory of blindness and insight, telling the story of their crossing. The point emerges most clearly in the Allegory of the Coats and the Three Brothers. In the Hack, as in Swift's own declarations, appears a complex mixture of blindness and insight, which complicates the usual binary opposition. Blindness and insight appear to relate to each other as do fancy and reason, slave and master, female and male, reader and writer, reading and writing.
