Literary Criticism (1400-1800) | A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift - Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr. (essay date 1963)

Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr. (essay date 1963)

SOURCE: Rosenheim, Edward W., Jr. “The Satiric Victim.” In Swift and the Satirist's Art, pp. 37-108. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

[In the following excerpt, Rosenheim provides a brief review of the satire in Swift's observations of the economy in A Modest Proposal.]

Strangely enough, A Modest Proposal¹ presents the reader with some of the same difficulties that are encountered in the Argument [against Abolishing Christianity]. With the exception of Gulliver's Travels, Swift's grotesque argument for infant cannibalism as a solution to the problems of Ireland is certainly the most widely read of his works. And it may be argued that the ordinary reader has little difficulty in understanding A Modest Proposal or in responding with shocked fascination to the incomparably outrageous method by which Swift suggests that a tragic human...

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