Sartor resartus - Thomas Carlyle

This extraordinary work is at one and the same time an account of a
personal spiritual crisis and a hilarious spoof on academic learning,
early Victorian values and materialism. In Sartor Resartus ('the
tailor retailored') a fictitious editor retells the theories of an
equally fictitious German professor who has come to the conclusion that
human institutions and morals are only clothes to shield us from
nothingness, clothes that can be changed as the whims of the age or
fashion dictate.

This radically deconstructive vision reveals
the very highest symbols of belief for what they are - merely symbols.
How to believe in anything after such an insight is a question even more
acute today than it was in Carlyle's time, when he first asked it in
this masterpiece of invention, parody and profound laughter.

This
Canongate Classics edition incorporates illustrations by Edmund
Sullivan, reproduced as they appeared in the 1898 edition of the text.
Also included is the notable Emerson preface to the original American
edition and an incisive, specially commissioned introduction from
Alasdair Gray.