Jonathan Swift was the king of satire. Yeah, all the Augustan writers were pretty good at satire, but Swift was the man in this arena. He was an Anglo-Irish writer who loved criticizing—among many other things—English policy toward the Irish, whom they were brutally colonizing.

Like his fellow writers, Swift was a pretty versatile guy. He wrote political pamphlets, poetry, and fiction, and he was also a clergyman in Dublin.

Gulliver's Travels

Along with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels is the second big novel of the Augustan age. It's an adventure story that tells the tale of Gulliver's shipwreck on the fictional island of Lilliput, which is full of very small people, and then it tells about Gulliver's travels through many other fantastic lands.

Gulliver's Travels is a great adventure story, but it's also a satire of the mindless adventure stories that were so popular at the time. Swift just couldn't help himself. He loved satirizing everything—including the very sub-genre he was writing in.

A Modest Proposal

In this political tract, Swift proposes that we should all eat Irish babies.

Okay, so he wasn't actually serious; he was satirizing English policies and attitudes toward the Irish. Those policies and attitudes were brutal, and Swift's point was that for all the English cared, they might as well have been eating up Irish babies.

The tract is a classic example of Swift's biting satire. It doesn't get much better than this.

Shmoops:

How satirical is Jonathan Swift? Oh, so satirical. So satirical, in fact, that in A Modest Proposal, he proposes that the English should all start eating Irish babies as a way to deal with Irish poverty. Check it out here (Quote #2).

There's a ton of symbolism in Gulliver's Travels. Here's an analysis of the way Swift uses symbolism in the novel.