A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s Travels

Key Concepts

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s TravelsSatire• A literary work that uses irony,

humor, and other techniques to point out problems and criticize the people who are causing them.

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s Travels

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s TravelsAnalyze Text Structure• Identify the pattern of organization

a writer uses to present his or her ideas.

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s Travels• By Jonathan Swift• Written in England around the

early 1700’s

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s TravelsParody• A parody is a humorous imitation of a

literary work that aims to point out the work’s shortcomings.

• Parodies usually imitate some defining characteristic of the work’s style.

• Gulliver’s Travels is in part a parody of early-eighteenth-century travel books, which delighted in describing exotic places and people.

A Modest Proposal/Gulliver’s TravelsMaking Inferences• Inferring is using your reason and

experience to guess at what an author does not say directly.

• Most works have an implied theme, which you must infer by considering all the elements of a story and asking what message about life the author conveys.