Definitions of Irony

(roughly from narrowest to broadest)

Verbal irony: A trope in which the meaning ostensibly expressed “differs sharply from” what the speaker really means.  A common type of verbal irony is sarcasm, which Abrams defines as “the crude and taunting use of apparent praise for dispraise: ‘Oh, you’re God’s great gift to women, you are!’”  Verbal irony has been subdivided by Wayne Booth into stable irony (where the author’s real meaning is clearly implied) and unstable irony (in which we have difficulty determining the author’s real views or even determining whether he is being ironic or not).

Socratic irony: A stance assumed by a teacher who pretends to be ignorant in order to make his or her students think.  (See any of Plato’s Socratic dialogues.)

Dramatic irony: The quality exhibited in words spoken by a character in a play or narrative who, because of his ignorance of present or future circumstances that the audience is aware of, does not realize how the words apply to his situation.  (Oedipus: “Why, I’d sooner marry my own mother than . . . “)

Structural irony: Pervasive irony created by a structural feature such as a naive protagonist whose viewpoint is consistently wrong, shared by neither author nor reader.  Swift’s “modest proposer” is the most famous example, but the female protagonist of Clueless creates similar structural irony as she misperceives those around her.  Voltaire’s Candide encounters many evils but always comments obtusely and stupidly upon them, saying “All is for the best.”  The repeated use of this catch phrase and other similar phrases gives the novel an ironic vocabulary, another device that can create structural irony.

Situational irony: A plot device in which events turn out contrary to expectation yet are perversely appropriate.  Example 1: In a school lottery, the “pocket rocket” motorcycle is won by a shy, demure nun.  Example 2: After successfully going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, the stunt man goes home, takes a shower, slips on the soap, and breaks his leg.  (Situational irony is the most commonly applied sense of the word irony, but it is often over-applied.  Strictly speaking, to be ironic, an outcome must be not only contrary to expectation, but perversely and strangely appropriate.)

Cosmic irony: When situational irony is associated with the notion of fate, or a deity, manipulating events so as to “frustrate and mock” a character in a literary work, situational irony has become its near-twin, cosmic irony.

Romantic irony: The narrator of a literary work creates an illusion of reality but then destroys the illusion by revealing that he is arbitrarily making up the story as he goes.  Byron claims to be writing a realistic tale in Don Juan but at one point admits that he got the idea for his central character from a puppet show.

Irony as a universal quality of good literature: Twentieth-century critics, notably T. S. Eliot and the “New Critics” I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, argued that (as Abrams puts it) “the greatest poems are invulnerable to external irony because they already incorporate the poet’s own ‘ironic’ awareness of opposite and complementary attitudes.”  Irony in this broadest sense entails the avoidance of sentimentality through the incorporation of multiple attitudes in a single work.  Furthermore, New Critics argued that it is precisely the resolution of internal tensions that gives a literary work its strength.  “To His Coy Mistress” is a key example in its blending of witty, grotesque, lyrical, and violent imagery.  “I Knew a Woman” is another key example--a great love poem blending lyricism, bawdy humor, and spiritual mysticism.

Quoted phrases are from M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8^th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2005).