This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, the book demonstrates how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis; this book ... More

This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, the book demonstrates how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis; this book derives definitions of irony inductively from its widespread use within modernist literature and culture. In doing so, the book situates irony’s philosophical history within an aesthetic vocabulary to show how writers employed “irony” as a keyword both before, during, and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. The book focuses on irony both as a literary and philosophical mode and also as a subject and object of discourse; therefore, chapters focus on writers who not only composed ironic texts, but who talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, and many others. While changing conventional wisdom about irony’s salient role in literary modernism, the book also argues that current debates about irony are best be understood as proxy debates about aesthetic politics, which dismiss a vital strain of non-electoral political action from literary, cultural, and political history.