Booth Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony

The University of Chicago Press,1974. — 293 p.
This is mainly a book about how we manage to share ironies and why we often do not; it is only secondarily a book of critical theory. I hope that it does, however, move toward some elementary
theoretical clarity about a subject which has been-especially since the Romantic period-the mother of confusions. There is no agreement among critics about what irony is, and many would hold to the romantic claim, faintly echoed in my final sentences, that its very spirit and value are violated by the effort clear about it. For both its devotees and for those who fear it,irony is usually seen as something that undermines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, or either liberates by destroying all dogma or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at -the heart of every affirmation. It is thus a subject that quickly arouses passions. No other term used by critics, except possibly "rhetoric" itself, has produced so many tracts about the nature of man or the universe or all literature or all good literature.
Of the many possible views one could take of such a protean subject, I have seen most value in the rhetorical. The way irony works in uniting (or dividing) authors and readers has been relatively neglected since the latter part of the eighteenth century, and it has never been fully explored. Before the eighteenth century, irony was one rhetorical device among many, the least important of the rhetorical tropes. By the end of the Romantic period, it had become a grand Hegelian concept, with its own essence and necessities; or a synonym for romanticism; or even an essential attribute of God. And in our century it became a distinguishing mark of all literature, or at least all
good literature, in some of what was said by New Critics like Cleanth Brooks. Perhaps the most original and important critic of our time, Kenneth Burke, has made irony into a kind of synonym for comedy, for the "dramatistic," and for dialectic : all of these refer, in life and literature, to the ways in which, for those who can tell a hawk from a handsaw, the hawk's view modifies or "discounts" the handsaw's, and vice versa.