Criticism > Literary Criticism (1400-1800) > A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift - Denis Donoghue (essay date 1969)
A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift - Denis Donoghue (essay date 1969)
Denis Donoghue (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: Donoghue, Denis. “Words.” In Jonathan Swift, a Critical Introduction, pp. 117-159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
[In the following excerpt, Donoghue remarks on the exuberant rhetoric of A Modest Proposal.]
Many features of [A Modest Proposal] are at once obvious and important; the tone of the projector fending off human and moral considerations in his economic zeal and yet, now and again, stumbling upon a cliché which conceals an ironic truth—as when the projector varies his diction and calls the people of Ireland ‘souls’; or the tour de force of out-Heroding Herod by parodying the Massacre of the Innocents. The basic technique is what Kenneth Burke calls ‘planned incongruity’, the imposition of a proper perspective by putting gross perspectives in lurid proximity. Much of Swift's irony is enforced by these discrepancies; the merit of incongruity is that...
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Criticism
- George Wittkowsky (essay date January-October 1943)
- Maurice Johnson (essay date May 1958)
- Oliver W. Ferguson (essay date October 1959)
- Louis A. Landa (essay date 1959)
- Charles Allen Beaumont (essay date fall 1960)
- Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr. (essay date 1963)
- John W. Tilton (essay date 1966)
- Samuel J. Rogal (essay date April 1968)
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- Denis Donoghue (essay date 1969)
- Thomas Lockwood (essay date summer 1974)
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- Robert F. Willson Jr. (essay date autumn 1976)
- C. N. Manlove (essay date 1978)
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- Robert Hunting (essay date 1989)
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