Narrative Ironies

This volume focuses on the flourishing of irony as a primary characteristic of the great era of European narrative sophistication from the Goethezeit to Modernism. Its eighteenth essays explore varieties of ironic consciousness associated with texts especially of northern Europe, and the ways they established a dialogue with and on literature and culture at large. As the volume shows, this interrogation of Europe's self-awareness of cultural identity bound up in reading and writing habits gained a new post-Cervantine complexity in Romanticism and has been of lasting significance for literary theory down to postmodernism. By its comparativistic framing of the issues raised by ironic consciousness, Narrative Ironies duly serves as a Festschrift honoring Lilian R. Furst. Among major writers treated are Sterne, Goethe, Godwin, Schlegel, Hoffmann, Poe, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, Disraeli, Keller, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, Wilde, Tolstoi, Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, Proust, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Szczypiorski.