| This paper aims to investigate Swift’s methods of satire and some aspects of his effective rhetorical devices deployed and found in A Modest Proposal. It also analyzes a wide variety of his rhetoric, such as conventional metaphors, which Swift makes use of deliberately in A Modest Proposal.
The ‘Modest Proposer’ devises the perfect prescription for some illnesses and plights of the contemporary Ireland after much study, and presents his horribly, grimly and grotesquely cannibalistic plan for eating the flesh of twelve-month-old infants. The ‘Modest Proposer’, Swift maintains that the maxim ─ people are the riches of a nation ─ should be applied to Ireland only if Ireland permits slavery or cannibalism. It is obvious that Swift directs his satiric targets at the English Government, the absentee landlords of Ireland and the Irish people as well. Swift attacks and denounces the Irish people for their folly, ignorance, idleness and moral corruptions as well as he laments the impoverished state of the Irish people and their sufferings in his humble submission.
|