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'Irony' comes from the Greek eironeia (εἰρωνεία) and dates back to the 5th century BCE.This term itself was coined in reference to a stock-character from Old Comedy (such as that of Aristophanes) known as the eiron, who dissimulates and affects less intelligence than he has—and so ultimately triumphs over his opposite, the alazon, a vain-glorious braggart.
Dramatic Irony is when the reader knows something important about the story that one or more characters in the story do not know. For example, in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the drama of Act V comes from the fact that the audience knows Juliet is alive, but Romeo thinks she's dead. If the audience had thought, like Romeo, that she ...
Example: The Man in the High Castle (1962). Historical fantasy; Historical mystery; Historical romance. Regency romance; Nautical fiction. Pirate novel; Metafiction (aka romantic irony in the context of Romantic literature): uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art while exposing the "truth" of a story. Metaparody ...
Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance, the sentence is straightforward and plausible, but the plot of the novel contradicts it: it is women without ...
For example, in The Frogs, after the God Dionysus claims to have sunk 12 or 13 enemy ships with Cleisthenes (son of Sibyrtius), his slave Xanthias says "Then I woke up." The philosopher Aristotle mentions the eirôn in his Nicomachean Ethics , where he says: "in the form of understatement, self-deprecation, and its possessor the self-deprecator ...
Juxtaposition is a literary technique which causes the audience to compare two elements simply because they are placed next to each other. When the comparison is unexpected, it creates irony. In some cases, this can be created through grammatical ambiguity. For example, success and failure.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Poetic justice, also called poetic irony, is a literary device with which ultimately virtue is rewarded and misdeeds are punished. In modern literature, [ 1 ] it is often accompanied by an ironic twist of fate related to the character's own action, hence the name "poetic irony".