A Modest Proposal in Context: Swift, Politeness, and A Proposal for giving Badges to the Beggars.
The present essay argues that the notion of politeness spans the distance between two disparate views of the Modest Proposal: one in which Swift is detached from his speaker, and another in which Swift is complicit in his speaker's brutality. Swift's essay can be seen as an attack on politeness in t...
| Published in: | Studies in Philology Vol. 114; no. 4; pp. 852 - 875 |
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| Format: | Article |
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University of North Carolina Press
Fall2017
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=125726784&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 125726784 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00393738 SPL jtl: Studies in Philology issn: 00393738 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Fall2017 vid: 114 iid: 4 pid: 2027 pub: University of North Carolina Press artinfo: ui: 125726784 10.1353/sip.2017.0030 ppf: 852 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 1.5MB tig: atl: A Modest Proposal in Context: Swift, Politeness, and A Proposal for giving Badges to the Beggars. aug: au: Hedrick, Elizabeth affil: The University of Texas at Austin su: Courtesy Etiquette Benevolence Kindness Hostility Poor people Modest Proposal, A (Book) Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 sug: subj: Courtesy Etiquette Benevolence Kindness Hostility Poor people Modest Proposal, A (Book) Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 ab: The present essay argues that the notion of politeness spans the distance between two disparate views of the Modest Proposal: one in which Swift is detached from his speaker, and another in which Swift is complicit in his speaker's brutality. Swift's essay can be seen as an attack on politeness in two ways. In the first, Swift attacks presuppositions about politeness of the sort embraced by contemporary Whigs, whose spokesmen were eager to regard it as yoking civility with natural benevolence. While Swift's speaker is superficially modest, his barbaric proposal shows that the putative link between politeness and kindness is spurious. The second way in which the Modest Proposal attacks politeness involves Swift's regard for his own idea of it. While Swift believed that politeness entailed self- command--the suppression of one's asocial impulses--his various writings on politeness suggest that he nonetheless found the rigors of self- command vexing. As an ironic satire, Swift's work attacks self- command in the process of embodying it. A comparison of the Modest Proposal with one of Swift's non- ironic proposals for dealing with the poor reveals clearly the hostility and the impulse to selfaggrandizement that Swift had to suppress in order to write the Modest Proposal. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Studies in Philology is the property of University of North Carolina Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Studies in Philology holder: University of North Carolina Press dt: @attributes: year: 2017 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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