A Brief Description Of A City Shower By Jonathan Swift
This essay discusses the purpose of rural and urban landscapes in Jonathan Swifts ' works, by portraying the urbanisation in A Description of a City Shower and the rural scenery in A Modest Proposal. The essay also considers the context of the time Swift wrote the two works and describes the urban and rural setting to illustrate his viewpoint.
“The first readers of the "City Shower," when it appeared in the Tatter No. 238 (October 17, 1710), had, outside their own knowledge and sensibilities, nothing but a slightly misleading headnote to guide their interpretation of the poem. That headnote compared Swift 's city shower to 'Virgil 's land-shower... a shower of consequence... bringing matters to a speedy conclusion between two potentates of different sexes '” (Meaning 195). Before the poem A Description of a City Shower was written, storms and showers in poetry had never been set in the city,
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It is as if he was saying “you will come to London as a clean, pure and naïve individual and this city will stain you and ruin you forever.” A Description of a City Shower was written at the beginning of the 18th century, a time when the Government and the Aristocracy tended to spend their money excessively. This practice encouraged the lower classes to believe that the city was a place of great fortune, when in reality only a few managed to succeed. It was a time of great increase in poverty and prostitution, since for some prostitution was far better that working as a servant or not having a job at all. Some young women often resorted to such a mean to survive. In the entire poem Swift makes fun of urbanization, because it made the place so corrupted that even the elements of nature are polluted. “Swift 's urban landscapes tend to resemble his rural ones in their similar images of discord, ruin, and alienation”
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726 Words | 3 PagesHe challenged the status quo by saying that selling the kids into slavery, not killing them when they are in the womb, and the benefits of eating the children and how it would help both families and the economy. The first way that Swift challenges the status quo is that he says that they should sell their children into slavery to save their parents from having to deal with them and pay for them. He says that by selling the kids into slavery it would take the burden off the parents, after the first year. Swift says, “a child just dropped from
Rhetorical Devices In A Modest Proposal
817 Words | 4 PagesHe does this to keep the genre a satire if he were to switch to considering these more reasonable options the force and flow of his essay would be lost. As Swift has been offering a satirical and outrageous proposal he is basically stating that the other expedients, like “taxing,” are dumb and killing the poor would be of better use. It is obvious to the reader that killing people is not the best option so by brushing off these other proposals he actually draws attention to
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683 Words | 3 PagesForget Shorter Showers and Waste Not, Want Not are two publications that are the direct opposite of each other. Forget Shorter Showers is an essay that was written by Derrick Jensen and publicized on July 8, 2009 in Orion Magazine. It is an article that counters the action of environmental conservation strategies. On the other hand, Waste Not, Want Not is a publication written seven years earlier in 1992 by Bill McKibben. Waste Not, Want Not comes up strongly to explain the ways that would help to curb the problem of having insufficient resources in our society.
Rhetorical Analysis Essay: A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift
576 Words | 3 PagesFor example on page 2 Swift says “so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends.” statements like this make Swift’s proposal even more outrageous. This is a sarcastic attempt by Swift to make the proposal look attractive, but his statement has an underlying meaning of making the idea look repulsive. Additionally on page 2 Swift states “That a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food.”
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A Modest Proposal Satire Analysis
834 Words | 4 PagesSwift’s satire consisted of many “modest theories.” For example, you may have heard people talk about overpopulation. You may have your own theories about it, but what about eating children? In this instance, Jonathan Swift used his form of humor, also known as satire, to get his point across, in which wrote a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal,” a mockery for the ideas of how to deal with overpopulation. “Satire is a technique employed by writers to
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1083 Words | 5 PagesCritical Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” In the work entitled “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, the theme of social injustice is enhanced by the use of verbal irony to convey a charged message. The ambiguous title and introduction to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece does little to prepare the reader for shocking content revealed later in the text. Swift’s work is powerful, poignant and persuasive because it strikes at the heart of the modern readers ethics, as it likely would have done for the author’s contemporary audiences. Jonathan Swift’s 1729 masterpiece is a satirical metaphor centered around the pervasive assertion, “the English are devouring the Irish.” Jonathan Swift gives a more comprehensive exordium concerning his work stating that is it “a modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents and country, and for making them beneficial to the public (Swift 1199).
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