Enlightenment Satire & Critique

Enlightenment satire and critique examine public conduct and human folly through irony, parody, and carefully constructed argument. Swift's imagined journeys, Pope's verse, and Johnson's moral essays give different forms to the distance between appearance and reality. A speaker may seem reasonable while exposing the cruelty or vanity of the position being advanced. The ironic distance between speaker and author gives apparently reasonable language its critical edge. These works preserve the disputes of their age while testing habits of pride, self-interest, and careless reasoning.