INTRODUCTION
8 diciembre 2010 by KSENIIA
This paper is going to be a continuation and expansion of the topic dealt with in the “First Paper”, Jonathan Swift’s political satire. Now I am going to analyze other works by Jonathan Swift such as his famous “A Tale of a Tub” with its prolegomena “The Battle of the Books”, then I will speak about Jonathan Swift in relation to Irish topic, and for this purpose I will take “A Modest Proposal” and “Drapier’s Letters” as an example. We will also have a quick look at some other ironical essays written by him.
Jonathan Swift uses satire – his favourite instrument – to reveal the problems of his contemporary society and to criticize different aspects of life. I will try to show how he employs satire to give the reader the image of the present situation in the country and to ridicule its inefficiencies and imperfections, and how he states his own point of view about the issue in question. Besides, we will try to see if the way Swift uses satire changes with time or not.
So, I will divide my paper into the parts that correspond to the analysis of the respective works by Swift: “The Battle of the Books”, “A Tale of a Tub”, “A Modest Proposal”, “Drapier’s Letters” and “Other Ironical Essays”. There is also a post “Swift and the Topic of Ireland” where I explain the importance of Ireland for Swift and his reasons to write about it, and “Conclusion”.
Of course, much more could be said about Swift’s satire and much more works could be commented on (for example, the topic of his political poetry has not been touched at all), but the books, analyzed by me in this paper, will be enough reference to have an idea about Swift’s style and his desire to illuminate the problems of his society in order to improve them.