Tub Main Page

A Reader's Guide to the Online Tale of a Tub

One alternative to the usual editorial introduction (of which I've already written two) is a set of starter links. These help to navigate what might axially look like a rather unintelligible text without necessarily imposing a vertical control over the text. (The editor's link's as just another home page horizontally pointing to other unprivileged locations in the text; the text of A Tale of a Tub could then be like the World Wide Web which might then be like the 'Tub' in the allegory of the tub and the whale in the Preface...) While proofing I noted a few passages in the text which were pretty funny, or in horrendously bad taste, or that might be otherwise interesting to a contemporary (i.e., lecherous and degenerate) readership.

Ideally, readers should suggest more of these, so that this list doesn't wholly reflect my own perverse subjectivity so exclusively. If you find anything, mail me (asingh@emerald.tufts.edu), and I will add them as soon as possible.

Criticism as Vapid/Abject/Excremental

  • Function of a Critic (III)
  • Gnawing on Scraps (X)
  • Writing upon nothing...(Conclusion)

    The Backwardsness and Anality of the Modern; Indices; Prefaces, &c.

  • The whole course of things...(VII)
  • I hold myself...(V)

    Modern Art and Modern Science as the Most Insidious Disease of All

  • To this end...(V)

    Genitalia! 'Indian pigmies'

  • The depletion of matter

    Where do Sermons come from?

  • Now, in their mysteries...

    Who said anything about ears?

  • It is good, therefore...

    'Bad neighborhoods' in 18th-Century London

  • Grub Street
  • Bedlam
  • Newgate