What techniques did Swift use in A Modest Proposal.
Satirical essays use humor, hyperbole and irony to criticize or poke fun at a subject. They are often aimed at political candidates, celebrities or current events. While satirical essays primarily entertain readers, the satire writer often seeks to provide relevant, useful, eye-opening information.There are three main types of satire; Juvenalian, Horatian, and Menippean. Horatian satire is named after the Roman satirist Horatian. It seeks to disapprove of rather than assault vice or folly. Some methods of satire include irony, wittiness, or embellishment.Swift’s superb rendering of satires leads Gulliver’s Travels to becoming a milestone looked up to by future literary persons in satirical literature. There are at least three types of satirical technique presented in Gulliver’s Travels: verbal irony, situational irony and dramatic irony.
Satire has been around for thousands of years, so it’s inevitable it has developed many complexities as a literary genre throughout its evolution. Arguably, the three most common types of satire (Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean) have now been intermingled and cross-pollinated to the extent where it’s not unknown for a modern work of satirical fiction to be a hybridised mongrel, of sorts.Some techniques he uses are parody and exaggeration. He uses exaggeration to get his point across and he uses parody to mock the situation. An example of his effective use of satire is, “I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers.
The essay is darkly funny at times, such as when Swift discusses different preparation techniques for the children, but is meant to also be shocking and horrifying. Twain's Horatian Satire.
