The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on August 4, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp053
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
The Generic Context of Defoe's The Shortest-Way With the Dissenters and the Problem of Irony
The Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract |
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Scholars have almost always treated Defoe's The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters with condescension or contempt. It has been seen as a satire that failed (and landed the author in the pillory) because Defoe did not manage to signal his irony. The Shortest-Way is commonly but misleadingly compared to Swift's A Modest Proposal, where irony is made absolutely explicit. I argue that Defoe was not being ‘ironic’, that he never expected his readers to distinguish between author and persona, and that a close reading of The Shortest-Way carried out without the presumption of ironic intent does not turn up plausible ‘signals’ of irony. The Shortest-Way needs to be understood in the context of satire in the opening years of the eighteenth century—and as a monitory satire, written not to humiliate or abuse targets but to warn like-minded readers. In fact, if we ask what signalling irony would have accomplished, then the long-standing ‘failed hoax’ reading seems worse than implausible. The piece was a counterfeit intended to be believed, and Defoe later expresses pride in having it taken for the real thing. The catastrophic results were precipitated not by Defoe's failure to signal irony, but by the outing of the author—a disclosure Defoe neither intended nor foresaw.