Publisher's Synopsis
The author - a poet, critic and novelist - concerns himself not with theories of irony, but with its practice, as attack or defence, in both literature and life.;He examines individual ironies, verbal and situational, and attempts to gauge their outcome in various spheres: religion, politics, censorship, love and death.;He looks at irony as seen in Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust, James, Freud, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Conrad, Mann, Brecht and more recent writers. He discusses irony unrecognized and irony wrongly presumed.;The study views irony as a style and as an approach to life and defends it as an often misunderstood attitude. Enright considers both the objections brought against irony and its role in humour.
