The Myth of Chaucerian Irony

Published: Papers on Language and Literature 24 (1988): 115-33. Reprinted in Joseph A. Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 135-49.

Description: Now a mainstay of Chaucerian criticism, the term "irony" has designated at least three different concepts in literary history, variously emphasizing the authority of the text, the poet, and the critic. Rhetorical irony, the "appeal to an absent authority," was the meaning of the term from classical times through Tyrwhitt and the eighteenth century.; Later critics--notably Kittredge--expounded romantic irony, which transferred authority from the text to the poet. Finally, the New Critics (especially Cleanth Brooks) furthered this transferal to the critic.