Literary Criticism (1400-1800) | A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift - Wayne C. Booth (essay date 1974)

Wayne C. Booth (essay date 1974)

SOURCE: Booth, Wayne C. “Essays, Satire, Parody.” In A Rhetoric of Irony, pp. 91-136. Chicago, III.: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

[In the following excerpt, Booth analyzes portions of A Modest Proposal, noting the irony of two contradictory readings.]

A MODEST PROPOSAL AND THE IRONIC SUBLIME

[It] is now time to turn to the difficulties offered by even more intricate contexts. For greatest speculative interest, I perhaps ought now to tackle one of the sources of famous critical disagreement—say, Swift's A Tale of a Tub, or the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, or Melville's Billy Budd. But for the purpose of understanding, it is still important to stress the sources of our agreement. And so I choose “A Modest Proposal,” to me the finest of all ironic satires. In spite of its intricacies it has produced enough critical consensus to justify my...

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