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 debateFor 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.
