Polite Conversation in Three Dialogues (Annotated)

Jonathan Swift's *Polite Conversation in Three Dialogues* is a brilliant satire of eighteenth-century manners, exposing the emptiness beneath fashionable speech. Presented as a handbook of socially acceptable exchanges, it assembles greetings, compliments, anecdotes, insults, and conversational formulas into comic dramatic scenes. Swift's deadpan arrangement and meticulous attention to cliché crea...