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Jonathan Swift Research Paper

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Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland taking place on November 30, 1667. Swift was an English author, who wrote the story Gulliver’s Travels, a masterwork of literature. Swift is most famously called a great satirizer because of his ability to mock societies, thoughts, and customs he reflected silly of harmful. His mockery is often unpleasant, but it is also often humorous. His most famous piece of written literature is Gulliver’s Travels. “It is often described as children read with delight, but which adults find serious and disturbing” (#27-A Giant's Property, Gulliver’s Travels). Nonetheless, when young readers typically identify that Swift’s “type” of world occasionally bear a resemblance to their own world. Grown-ups distinguish …show more content…

Afterward when Gulliver is shipwrecked he is marooned on a peculiar island. Gulliver first visits the Lilliputians- tiny people whose size and surroundings are only one twelfth the sizes of those opposed of standard individuals and belongings. The Lilliputians treat Gulliver well at first. Gulliver helps them, but after a period the Lilliputians turn against him and he is content to discharge from them. “The Lilliputian emperor actively persecuted the Tories, hence the whole high heel/low heel thing” (Shmoop, Gulliver’s Travels). “The rebel group exists because the kingdom is divided into two factions, called Tramecksan and Slamecksan. The people in the two factions are distinguished by the heights of their heels” (Spark notes Gulliver’s Travels, Part I Chapter IV). The emperor of Lilliputian also venerates to start wars and wants to enslave his own neighboring people on the other island adjacent to Lilliputian. And when Gulliver is offered the chance to prove himself worthy of destroying the neighboring island of Blefuscu, he contradicts it and this enrages the emperor of Lilliputian. “A war has been

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Opinions on tragic events are usually something sought as serious and dreary. Trying to find the best way to have a solution for the problem. However, in A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift provides a different approach on solving a certain tragedy. A solution by no means actually providing a benefit but by conveying a satirical diction towards the situation. Swift's satirical tone and ironic persona reveals his use of rhetorical strategies to prepare the reader for his proposal.

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Swift makes extensive use of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos within the first eight paragraphs to create a strong initial argument that captures the audience’s attention and provide assurance that the information presented is viable. Swift starts with an appeal to Pathos by describing the state of Ireland: “the Streets, the Roads, and Cabin-Doors, crowded with Beggars of the female Sex, followed by three, four, or six Children, all in Rags, and importuning every Passenger for an Alms” (Swift, 1). The description of Ireland leaves a gloomy effect on the audience, as they are met with a somber tone set forth by a description on how thousands of people are affected by the poverty in Ireland. Swift continues this appeal to Pathos by describing the state of families within this poverty: “this prodigious number of Children, in the Arms, or on the Backs, or at the heels of their Mothers, and frequently of their Fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the Kingdom, a very great additional grievance” (Swift, 2). This description of the melancholy state of Ireland creates an emotional appeal because, the thought of having mass amounts of children being forced to cling to their Mothers and Fathers in a desperate struggle for survival, is a morose image.

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He also includes imagery in A Modest Proposal. Swifts exaggerated imagery leaves a strong impact on the reader. In using descriptions like, “...carcass of a good fat child...” (93), he engraves a horrifying image on a baby on a platter in the minds of the reader. The strong uses of imagery throughout the essay bring his point across. A third rhetorical device that this essay is thick with is irony.

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947 Words | 4 Pages

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is a very interesting take on how the Irish government should cure the famine that the country was then facing. However, the entire proposal was completely bizarre, and the whole point of the essay was to bring attention to the idea that they needed a solution to the all the problems they were experiencing but the proposal was definitely not it. He even had a strongly developed plan as to how his proposal would work which makes the reader feel as if he is serious about selling children, eating them, and using their skins as a fashion accessory; however, ultimately this proposal was not his true goal. Jonathan Swift skillfully used different styles of writing, such as imagery and irony, to show why the

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He cannot understand that a “creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities” and comes to a conclusion that we were “fitted” with a “quality” to “increase our natural vices” instead of reason. The horse even admits that the “corruption of that faculty” could even be worse than the “brutality” of the creatures parallel to humans in that part of the novel (4), the Yahoos. There is a strong situational irony here as a horse, who is treated as the Yahoos are in Gulliver’s Travels, is nobler than Gulliver and, as the concept of a reasonable Yahoo is discombobulating, the horse concludes that Europeans are more dangerous than the Yahoos with connotations of savagery to display this. This mocks human pride and morality and shows our misunderstanding of how we actually appear. Again, this can be emphasised by the essay on Swift’s Moral Satire in Gulliver’s Travels when it displays the two perceptions: the “unillusioned perception of man as he actually is” and the “ideal” perception.

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When it came to Ethos, Swift was not quite as persuasive as he could have been. He does have a background when it comes to writing about corrupt governments in tales such as “Gulliver’s Travels.” The way Swift wrote this essay, however, makes it feel slightly less objective. Even when he is writing from the point of a wealthier Irishman, his overall tone shows a large amount of contempt towards the higher economic classes. Instead of allowing the readers to read alternative arguments on this subject, he focused strictly on his own opinion.

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Despite Gulliver’s respect for Master Hyouhnhnm, the reader does not feel the same way due to the book’s satire. The book clearly makes Gulliver’s love of Hyouhnhnm’s rational culture an object of satire through Gulliver’s incredibly harsh views on humanity as well as his apparent craziness shown by him “conversing with [his two stable horses] at least four hours everyday…they live in great amity with me.” (Swift, 250) By portraying Gulliver as a madman, the reader begins to disagree with Gulliver’s beliefs about Hyouhnhnms, especially his adoration of Master

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In addition to the equality of slaves, another main theme throughout Swift 's novel is the idea of equality for all persons. During The Enlightenment, there were social, economic, sexual and many other inequalities among different types of people. Swift incorporates this thought when Gulliver is in the land of the Houyhnhnms. In this land, there are Houyhnhnms, who are in essence a group of intelligent horses. Also, there are Yahoos who are a strange animals that are comparable to a human.

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Swift’s satire consisted of many “modest theories.” For example, you may have heard people talk about overpopulation. You may have your own theories about it, but what about eating children? In this instance, Jonathan Swift used his form of humor, also known as satire, to get his point across, in which wrote a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal,” a mockery for the ideas of how to deal with overpopulation. “Satire is a technique employed by writers to

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In literature, the element of satire is employed to illustrate or exploit the corruption of a society by means of exaggeration, black humor, highbrow wit, or mockery. The writer's intent is to make permanent change for a problem or fight a cause in a society that otherwise looks away in ignorance. In "A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift spins a web of masterful satire to propose a grisly solution to the problem of poverty, which mocks the folly of the 18th century socially elite and puts the blame on the greed of the wealthy for the sickly state of the nation. The Restoration and the 18th century for the British was a time of great commercial and economic prosperity, and the Anglican Church remained closely tied with the governmental power

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The Ancient Art of Corruption Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels: Part II. A Voyage to Brobdingnag implicitly reveals the corruption taking place in the dawn of the eighteenth century, almost ironically foreshadowing political occurrences taking place in today’s modern age, such as the privatization of prisons in America. Jonathan Swift grew up in the late seventeenth century. As Collin Wells pointed out, “Jonathan Swift is generally recognized as the English language’s most accomplished prose satirist. Born of an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin” (Wells), Swift acquired significant fame and respect throughout his life.

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Satire in Gulliver’s Encounters Jonathan Swift has used Gulliver’s encounters to illustrate how human behaviors are portrayed by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. He uses Gulliver to bring out the irony in human beings lives and how human beings hide their character when they want to appear good before people. Today human behavior is geared towards individual’s interests. Human behavior is full of selfishness at the expense of others.

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“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people”. This quote is perfect for this novel because Gulliver’s Travels judges the British society of the particular time period through the heart and soul of the main character Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels makes many annotations on British society of their particular time period. As Gulliver visits different islands at the time he discovers many different societies and their people. All the societies that Gulliver discovers are used as a comparison to British society of the time period throughout the novel.

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Critical Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” In the work entitled “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, the theme of social injustice is enhanced by the use of verbal irony to convey a charged message. The ambiguous title and introduction to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece does little to prepare the reader for shocking content revealed later in the text. Swift’s work is powerful, poignant and persuasive because it strikes at the heart of the modern readers ethics, as it likely would have done for the author’s contemporary audiences. Jonathan Swift’s 1729 masterpiece is a satirical metaphor centered around the pervasive assertion, “the English are devouring the Irish.” Jonathan Swift gives a more comprehensive exordium concerning his work stating that is it “a modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents and country, and for making them beneficial to the public (Swift 1199).

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The Spectrum of Humanity In Gulliver’s Travels: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Jonathan Swift explains the journey of a man, Gulliver, to an island inhabited by Houyhnhnms. On this island, the roles are reversed to where the Yahoos, humans, are the lower beings, and the houyhnhnms, horses, are the superior beings. The houyhnhnms are creatures of honesty and justice while the yahoos are unteachable beings who run rampant. When looking at the main characters of this story—the houyhnhnms, the yahoos, and Gulliver—symbolize the differences in the scale of humanity.

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