Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
The Voice of the Underdog
By William Empson
A Rhetoric of Irony
by Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 292 pp., $12.50
This is a good book. It quotes a number of long examples, arguing from them in detail 'how we manage to share ironies and why we often do not,' with mild discouragement for current follies on the subject; and the literary judgments (as apart from philosophical or historical ones) seem to me right every time. There is plenty of theoretical discussion, with a five-page bibliography, and nearly all the names there recur in the index to pages. I found it all the more extraordinary that what I had long thought 'irony' to mean does not get mentioned at all.
Review, 3127 words
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