What Are The Rhetorical Devices Used In A Modest Proposal

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“A Modest Proposal” is written by Jonathan Swift, who wanted to raise awareness of the issue of poverty in Ireland. He thought suggesting unethical solutions like eating children might make other people to start thinking about the actual solutions. He uses emotional appeals and satire in this article. Emotional appeals are used as providing a solution of killing babies and eating them. No one wants their babies to be someone else’s dinner so it probably has touched the readers emotionally. Satire is used everywhere in the article. In paragraph 11 and 12, it says that a child of employees under Landlords, would be a great food for Landlords since “as they have already devoured most of the Parents”. It is an example of hyperbole. Hyperbole is when a figure of speech is used for exaggeration or overstatement. The part where it says that the employees are devoured by …show more content…
The Propagation of Swines Flesh, and Improvement in the Art of making good Bacon,..”. This sentence is witty or humorous in other words because they are comparing babies to bacon and beef. It is very cruel but it is witty in a way that Swift calls babies as another form of bacon or beef. Jonathan Swift has written a few more articles using satire both as horatian and juvenalian. “A Modest Proposal” is definitely juvenalian because it deals with a serious real life problem, poverty, in an emotional, bitter and angry ways. It is emotional and bitter how Swift had to make up such unethical solutions like killing, selling and eating children to solve the problem of poverty. Also, it is a very provocative article since it is very possible that readers might get mad due to immoral solutions. Therefore, this article is more juvenalian than