Have You Eaten Yet?: Swift's Final Solution
As a lately favored eighteenth century essay, Jonathan Swift's "Proposal" has been canonized as a satirical model of wit. As will be discussed shortly, Swift's essay is often seen as an allegory for England's oppression of Ireland. Swift, himself and Irishman (Tucker 142), would seem to have pointed his razor wit against the foreign nation responsible for his city's ruin. Wearing the lens of a New Historicist, however, requires that we reexamine the power structures at work in Swift's society. We must delve into not only Swift's "Proposal," but also into other of his correspondence, and even into discourse of the epoch in order to gain a thick description of the many levels of understanding present in Swift's "Proposal."
As a model of rhetorical discourse, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or......
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