Should we analyse literary works within their historical context? Make references to Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.

Studying a text as well as its contexts allows for a broader and more informed understanding of the author’s intentions and the impact of the text at the time, creating a helpful mode of comparison to its effect on studies in the modern day. For contemporary readers unaware of A Modest Proposal’s historical context, Swift’s work both unsettles and induces a feeling of unease, due to the Modest Proposer’s malicious and cruel approach to alleviating Irish poverty. The cannibal scheme proposed by Swift’s far from “modest” narrator unreservedly degrades and dehumanises the Irish proletariat, depicting them as “filth and vermin”, which in the eighteenth-century, was a term frequently used to describe insects such as fleas or lice. By depicting Ireland as being plagued and infested by the working class, who “breed … three, four, or six Children, all in Rags”, the speaker attempts to justify his outrageous proposal of infanticide and cannibalism. The study of Swift’s Proposal without acknowledging the history surrounding it allows for the text to be integrated with more relevance to contemporary society; consenting to its adaptation and transformation over time, as opposed to it staying a part of history and a product of the eighteenth-century. The text subsequently becomes a fluid and organically changing entity as opposed to a source from the past.