SOURCE: Booth, Wayne C. “Essays, Satire, Parody.” In A Rhetoric of Irony, pp. 91-136. Chicago, III.: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

In the following excerpt, Booth analyzes portions of A Modest Proposal, noting the irony of two contradictory readings.

A Modest Proposal and the Ironic Sublime

[It] is now time to turn to the difficulties offered by even more intricate contexts. For greatest speculative interest, I perhaps ought now to tackle one of the sources of famous critical disagreement—say, Swift's A Tale of a Tub, or the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, or Melville's Billy Budd. But for the purpose of understanding, it is still important to stress the sources of our agreement. And so I choose “A Modest Proposal,” to me the finest of all ironic satires. In spite of its intricacies it has produced enough critical consensus to justify my calling it stable, not only in...