“Introduzione"

The Introduction highlights the intensely disturbing array of parodic, satiric and ironic devices that Swift artfully contrives in his most notorious and controversial pamphlet devoted to the Irish question. Despite its adamant argumentative clarity and its disarmingly exact calculations, "A Modest Proposal" continues to puzzle and confound readers of all ages by virtue of the vitriolic force of its cannibalistic scheme. Nobody can escape the fierce outrage that marked the years Swift spent in Dublin as a sort of exile: on the one hand, the satirist denounces England’s brutish policy of capitalistic and colonial exploitation of ‘Irish savages’, on the other, he offers a merciless analysis of the unbearable inertia and depravation of Irish people themselves, forcing the reader to a radical rethinking of human boundaries and normality.