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Samuel Johnson gives as an example the sentence, "Bolingbroke was a holy man" (he was anything but). [24] [25] Verbal irony is sometimes also considered to encompass various other literary devices such as hyperbole and its opposite, litotes, conscious naïveté, and others. [26] [27]
Irony punctuation is any form of notation proposed or used to denote irony or sarcasm in written text. Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap. The oldest is the percontation point in the form of a reversed question mark (βΈ®), proposed ...
The use of humor, irony or exaggeration to criticize. An example is Network. One of the earliest examples is Gulliver's Travels, written by Jonathan Swift. The television program South Park is another. Sensory detail: Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. The same as imagery. The boot was tough and sinewy between his hard-biting teeth.
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as". A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms. Example: "From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects."
A painting of Jonathan Swift. Swift's essay is widely held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of English literature.Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of the essay describes the plight of starving beggars in Ireland, so that the reader is unprepared for the surprise of Swift's solution when he states: "A young healthy child ...
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
Irony – Creating a trope through implying the opposite of the standard meaning, such as describing a bad situation as "good times". Litotes – A figure of speech and form of verbal irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.
Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance, the sentence is straightforward and plausible, but the plot of the novel contradicts it: it is women without ...