Have You Eaten Yet?: Swift’s Final Solution As a lately favored eighteenth century essay, Jonathan Swift’s "Proposal" has been canonized as a satirical model of wit. As will be discussed shortly, Swift’s essay is often seen as an allegory for England’s oppression of Ireland. Swift, himself and Irishman (Tucker 142), would seem to have pointed his razor wit against the foreign nation responsible for his city’s ruin. Wearing the lens of a New Historicist, however, requires that we reexamine the power structures at work in ....