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For 2,500 years, irony has been a subject of fascination鈥攁nd vexation. In Isn鈥檛 It Ironic, acclaimed author Ben Yagoda presents a compelling tour of irony鈥檚 complicated history in literature, philosophy, the arts, and popular culture鈥攆rom Plato and Jane Austen to Ralph Ellison and David Letterman, and from the post-9/11 鈥渆nd of irony鈥� to today鈥檚 debates about being 鈥渋rony-pilled鈥� or 鈥渋rony-poisoned.鈥�

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 鈥渋ronic鈥� 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鈥檛 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鈥檛 It Ironic is a captivating demonstration of why irony has intrigued writers, artists, and their audiences for so many centuries.