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| | Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": "Irony" by Norman D. Knox |
 | | In the early eighteenth century, the omnipresence of French and English satiric literature brought the idea of irony, so called, out of the classroom into the intellectual marketplace; during the intervening twenty centuries it lived in, or on the edge of, rhetorical theory, the two chief fountains of which were Cicero and Quintilian. |
 | | Such irony, A. Schlegel said, was a defense against "overcharged one-sidedness in matters of fancy and feeling." He assumed that all intelligent people were relativists: by constant ironic qualification Shakespeare "makes a sort of secret understanding with. |
 | | In literature, as in life, they would reside in the comprehensiveness of the author’s activity: a perfected work might be "limited at every point," but in its inclusion of all contradictions it would be "without limitation and inexhaustible." (For authoritative discussions of and references to F. Schlegel’s scattered pronouncements, see Immerwahr, Wellek, and Muecke.) |
| www.autodidactproject.org /other/ironydhi.html (4832 words) |
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