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Swift's a Modest Proposal.(Jonathan Swift )(Critical essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20060922
Author:Bengels, Barbara

That Jonathan Swift could devastate the object of his satire through the use of wordplay is particularly apparent in "A Modest Proposal," in which his concern over England's economic strictures evokes a most recurrent and vicious pattern of imagery through the seemingly harmless vehicle of clothing.

Right from the first paragraph, he begins alluding to the sartorial state of the Irish as he writes of "Beggars of the Female Sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags" (Swift 502; emphasis added). By the fourth paragraph he incorporates a double meaning when he ...

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