Jonathan Swift writes A Modest Proposal, a haunting satire taking place in 1720-1730 Ireland. Rather than making jokes of the treatment of the poor Irish, he chooses to be scathing, condemning and dead serious. Using effective character use and diction he creates a character that proposes the slaughter at the age of 1 year’s old to solve the poverty of Ireland. Firstly, the seriousness of the character that Swift keeps up throughout the essay severely frightens the reader. The proposition he…
Trish Dunlop was born in 1963 and is fifty four years old. She grew up in Lancaster, California in the high desert. She remembers going to the movie theaters in the 70's in her youth. Trish Dunlop offers the perspective of a child and teen during the New Hollywood era and the rise of blockbusters. The movies Trish went to that stood out the most in her memory were Jaws, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Aristocats and "a lot of Herbie movies." The "Herbie movies" were a film franchise that began…
predator and prey. The narrator views the Irish people as vulnerable prey who are regarded as animals. This view that the impoverished Irish people are a group of animals is seen as a sign that they are hunted. This predator versus prey is seen throughout the story, not just the opening lines. On page 316, the narrator asserts, "…a young healthy child…delicious…stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled." This animal-like imagery shows that the narrator views the Irish children as food, not as children.…
the uncanny, has allowed Irish writers to align nationalist motifs within their texts through a more analogous narrative. As Laura Doyle writes, “The Gothic text has been shown to represent colonialism 's crimes through its literary tropes of imprisonment, terror, rape, and tyranny” (513). However, a number of Anglo-Irish writers engage with the genre, thus forcing the allegorical themes and content of Irish Gothic writing to be reconsidered with new ideologies in mind. Irish Anglicans represent…
murderer to others. It is often hard to believe that simple things such as potatoes can be such a devastating thing to engulf a nation. This is of course the Great Hunger, also known as the Great Famine. It was one if not the most devastating events in Irish history. Costing Ireland an estimated 800,000 lives to hunger , and even more emigrating out to other nations. Though this number does not stack up to other tragedies in size, this made up roughly 10 percent of the population alone, not…
The Irish Diaspora in the US is massive with the 1990 census totalling an immense 43 million Americans consider themselves to be Irish American which at the time equated to roughly 19% of the American population(Feargal Cochrane 2007:218). Beyond just equating for a fifth of the American population, a third of American…
symbol of Irish pride. Whether it be due to the luck of the Irish or being in the right place at the right time, Saint Patrick, at least his name rather than his legacy, is long from being buried in the depths of history. Patrick was born in 387…
the course of history, politics and comedy often go hand in hand. Edgeworth uses this idea to make some very interesting commentary about the state of the relationship between Britain and Ireland at the time, and what it meant to be truly British or Irish. Within the novel we meet the character of young Lord Glenthorn, who is bored of his rich and extravagant life, and no longer takes any interest in the fortunes in his possession. We learn shortly that the only reason he does not end his own…
Patrick McCabe and John McGahern are noted as two of Ireland’s most influential writers. Although their works have similar themes and take on issues prevalent in Ireland at the time, they have drastically different writing styles. McCabe is cynical yet humorous as he takes on darker subject matters. McGahern in more straightforward in his delivery of despairing plots. McCabe takes a strong interest in small-town Ireland and uncovers the inner workings of small-town folk, all the while…
times when one’s observations of what surrounds him or her lead to conclusions about common sense and society standards . In “Among the School Children,” W.B.Yeats structures his poem as an argumentative piece criticising the social status of the Irish people at the time. To accomplish this, Yeats starts by building up a speaker that could convey this message . The speaker characterises himself as a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” but one can also see evidence of literacy as he keeps…