Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen (Burden) to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick (Public)" uses principally the devices of satire, sarcasm, and irony.
Swift proposed that the poor of Ireland be made less of a burden to the English public by selling and eating 100,000 out of 120,000 Irish children born each year. He obviously was not serious. He was criticizing those English who described the Irish poor in dehumanizing terms as parasites, who blamed the victims rather than those who made them poor, English exploiters, especially absentee landlords who exported food for profit rather than feed those in need.
The irony of Swift's proposal was of course that, without most of an Irish work force, those who profited from exploiting the Irish would no longer be able to. A second irony was that Swift only proposed doing by cannibalism what was already being done by predatory capitalism, living off the misery of others.
Monday, August 10, 2015
List five rhetorical devices used by Jonathan Swift in "A Modest Proposal"
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