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Swift's Use of Lateralization as a Rhetorical Device

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Maurice J. Quinlan
Maurice J. Quinlan*
Affiliation:
Boston College, Boston, Mass
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Extract

The terse comment that Swift's “style was well suited to his thoughts” has been explored and substantiated in various studies. These have dealt with Swift's knowledge of classical rhetoric, his conciseness, his skillful use of maxims, parody, illustrative parallels, sophistry, exaggeration, and similar topics. His puns and metaphors have also received attention. No one, however, seems to have discussed in detail his use of what may be called literalization of metaphor—a distinctive feature of his rhetoric and one that, in some instances, consists of a combination of pun and metaphor, I propose therefore to examine various aspects of the device of literalization as it appears in his prose works.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 516 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), iii, 52.

2 Books on Swift's rhetoric include the following: Charles A. Beaumont, Swift's Classical Rhetoric (Athens, Ga., 1961); John M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); Martin Price, Swift's Rhetorical Art (New Haven, Conn., 1953).

3 Swift's tendency to literalize metaphors is briefly commented on by Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton, 1961), p. 204, and by David French, “Swift, Temple and ‘A Digression on Madness’,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, v (Spring 1963), 42–57.

4 Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1939–), vi, xix, 155—hereafter cited in the text by volume and page.

5 A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1958), p. 43, n. 6.

6 Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 242.