“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do
generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason
for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are
offended with it.”—Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), The Battle of the Books (1704)
Today marks the 350th anniversary of the
birth of Jonathan Swift. Contrary to recent rumor, the term “Swiftian”
does not apply to a certain pop songstress who rakes ex-beaus over the coals
for their sins, but instead to this novelist and pamphleteer and his style of
satire exhibited in Gulliver’s Travels (mistakenly
marketed for years as a children’s book) and “A Modest Proposal”: caustic,
bitter, featuring an unreliable narrator, and ferocious toward what a later
writer in this tradition, the American Mark Twain, once called “the damned
human race.”
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