Four Walls

Irony/wit and Romance in Jane Austen Irony According to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, “Most forms of irony involve the perception or awareness of a discrepancy or incongruity between words and their meaning, or between actions and their results, or between appearance and reality. The two basic kinds of irony are verbal irony and irony of the situation (for the latter one may substitute, on occasions, the irony of behavior). At its simplest, verbal irony involves saying what one does not mean. Johnson defined it as a mode of speech in which meaning is contrary to the words.