Irony's Edge by Linda Hutcheon (review)

HUMANITIES 143 Linda Hutcheon. Irony's Edge Routledge 1994. x, 248. $88.00, cloth, $23.99 paper In Irony's Edge, Linda Hutcheon has produced the best general study of irony to appear since Wayne Booth's A Rhetoric a/Irony (1974). Like Booth's work, Irony's Edge is enormously useful because of the care and common sense with which it sorts through many of the fundamental issues relevant to any discussion of irony. Yet Irony's Edge also draws upon more recent critical studies in underscoring the importance of irony's ideological bite. As its title insists, irony always has an edge and that edge, at once evaluative and affective, is what distinguishes it from other tropes. At the same time, Irony's Edge remains a modest book, modest in ways that may well provoke certain readers - and mean to do so. It refuses to pin irony down too firmly; it largely refrains from taking sides in the interpretive contests it surveys. And it relies a good deal upon interpretive categories, such as discursive community, that remain rather loosely defined. Yetthese things, too, are part of Hutcheon's point: that there are real limits to how fully we can theorize irony's operation. Despite its brevity, Hutcheon's text achieves three distinctly impressive purposes. First, it provides a compendious survey of recent critical literature on irony, ranging across literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies, and art history. Indeed, it accomplishes this aim so effectively that a newcomer to the topic could scarcely do better than begin here. Second, it lays out a set of richly devel