GATE 2021 XH2 – Question 29

History of English Literature and Literary Studies · English Literary Traditions across Time: Chaucer to contemporary English literature · 1 mark · Multiple choice

An eighteenth-century satirical tract imagines a well-nursed one-year-old child as “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food”. Identify the tract.

John Stuart Mill,On Liberty
Francis Bacon,On Death
Jonathan Swift,A Modest Proposal
Robert Graves,Warning to Children

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Correct answer: (C) Jonathan Swift,A Modest Proposal

Explanation

Swift’s A Modest Proposal adopts a coldly calculating proposer’s voice to satirise the treatment of poverty through the shocking proposal of eating children. Thus C. The grotesque proposition is satirical, and is not the author’s literal policy recommendation.

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