**Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is a satire and intended to be taken seriously.Compare and contrast the way in which Swift and Dryden created the satire in “A Modest Proposal” and “MacFlecknoe” respectively, and the purposes of their satires..**

                         Satire is "a composition in verse or prose holding up vice or folly to ridicule or lampooning              individuals.The use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm, etc., in speech or writing for the ostensible purpose of exposing and discourage vice or folly. In other words, satire is a particular use of humour for overtly moral purposes. It seeks to use laughter, not just to remind us of our common often ridiculous humanity, but rather to expose those moral excesses, those corrigible sorts of behaviour which transgress what the writer sees as the limits of acceptable moral behaviour.

Jonathan Swift and John Dryden used satire in their works…

A Modest Proposal ( for preventing the children of the poor people in Ireland from being aburden to their parents or country, and for making hem beneficial to the public) By Jonathan Swift (1729)….

       Jonathan Swift's masterful satire, "A Modest Proposal," proposes to solve the devastating poverty in Ireland by selling poor children as food for wealthy families. Swift goes on to explain how this would solve all of Ireland's problems from domestic abuse to poverty. Swift 's Projector explains his proposal in depth, in many ways treating these children as nothing more than a new type of livestock. Towards the end, however, Swift lists numerous reforms that could help the country. This list makes a change in tone. However, these reforms differ from Swift's "modest proposal" because instead of the poor sacrificing their children, it would involve the rich sacrificing some of their luxuries.

        Swift’s main target in A Modest Proposal was not the conditions in Ireland, but rather the can-do spirit of the times that led people to devise a number of illogical schemes that would purportedly solve social and economic ills. Swift was especially insulted by projects that tried to fix population and labor issues with a simple cure-all solution. A Modest Proposal also targets the calculating way people perceived the poor in designing their projects. The pamphlet targets reformers who "regard people as commodities.

                          Reductio ad absurdum: is a popular satiric technique (especially in Swift), whereby the author agrees enthusiastically with the basic attitudes or assumptions he wishes to satirize and, by pushing them to a logically ridiculous extreme, exposes the foolishness of the original attitudes and assumptions. Reductios are sometimes dangerous either because the reader does not recognize the satire at work or because the reader fails to identify the target clearly. The most famous example of this technique in an English satire is Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

          Swift observed the  satire is like a mirror in which people see everyone's face except their own.It  is a very accurate observation, and to some extent the satirist is probably engaging in something of a vain endeavour: to get people to recognize their own ridiculousness and to avoid it in the future. Still, there may be some other, more useful point. For satire is not just a matter of attacking the target; it's also a matter of attacking or at least challenging those who believe in the target, who do not see, that is, the moral imperfections at the basis of a particular social or political stance. The essay (A Modest Proposal )is widely held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of the essay describes the plight of starving beggars in Ireland, so that the reader is unprepared for the surprise of Swift's solution when he states, "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."

MacFleckno by Jonh Dryden (1678)..

   Mac Flecknoe is a verse mock-heroic satire written by John Dryden in 1678.It is is full of satire. Dryden writes scathingly of colleagues Thomas Shadwell and Richard Flecknoe, insulting their poetry, their writing ability, their mental capacity, even Shadwell's weight. Dryden used the poem to insult both Shadwell and Flecknoe. This ridicule serves two purposes: first, it attempts to make the target change his or her own behavior, and second, it encourages others not to act in that manner being acknowledged. The only reason Dryden wrote the poem, they conclude, was because he did not like or approve of Shadwell and Flecknoe.

                          Mock Heroic, a particular form of burlesque is a satiric style which sets up a deliberately disproportionate and witty distance between the elevated language used to describe an action and the triviality or foolishness of the action.One  of the greatest mock heroic satires in English poetry are "Mac Flecknoe" by Dryden.

            In the poem "Mac Flecknoe, satire employs wit and humor as a device of ridicule by transforming the meanings of words. , John Dryden’s satiric perspective both makes us laugh and reveals the absurdity of the literary values of his society.

THE END:)

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