Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Isn't It Ironic.: The Amazing Saga of a Not-Bad Figure of Speech

Isn't It Ironic.: The Amazing Saga of a Not-Bad Figure of Speech

Yagoda, Ben

Hardcover

Literary CriticismLinguistics

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0691258023
ISBN13: 9780691258027
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Pages: 272
Language: English

From the ancient Greeks to the irony-poisoned Generation Z, an enlightening, entertaining, and surprising history of an essential idea and rhetorical tool that people love, hate, and love to debate

For 2,500 years, irony has been a subject of fascination--and vexation. In Isn't It Ironic, acclaimed author Ben Yagoda presents a compelling tour of irony's complicated history in literature, philosophy, the arts, and popular culture--from Plato and Jane Austen to Ralph Ellison and David Letterman, and from the post-9/11 end of irony to today's debates about being irony-pilled or irony-poisoned.

Beginning in ancient Greek comedy and adopted by Plato to describe Socrates, irony was viewed for two millennia as a potent rhetorical tool: making a point by saying something different (and sometimes opposite) from what you really meant. But the word took a turn in the nineteenth century, when a clergyman named Connop Thirlwell first to used ironic in the now familiar, but still controversial, sense of a striking incongruity between expected and actual outcomes. At the same time, philosophers like Kierkegaard proposed irony as nothing less than a core principle of life. The last century has seen ever-faster pendulum swings: irony outbreaks followed by backlashes against it.

As it traces the changing meanings and fortunes of irony, Isn't It Ironic explores masters of the trope such as Swift, Flaubert, Twain, and Hemingway, and anti-ironists like David Foster Wallace. It also argues that the most ironic century was the eighteenth, but the most ironic decade was the 1970s.

A witty yet authoritative literary and cultural history, Isn't It Ironic is a captivating demonstration of why irony has intrigued writers, artists, and their audiences for so many centuries.

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