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An example of situational irony: despite the sign above reading "welcome," the sign below threatens unauthorized parking in the area with towing.. Irony, in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what appears to be the case on the surface and what is actually the case or to be expected.
For example, in Saki's "The Interlopers", two men engaged in a generational feud become trapped beneath a fallen tree in a storm: "Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass ...
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").
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 ...
The literary critic and rhetorician, I. A. Richards, divides a metaphor into two parts: the vehicle and the tenor. [21] In the following example, Romeo compares Juliet to the sun (the vehicle), and this metaphor connecting Juliet to the sun shows that Romeo sees Juliet as being radiant and regards her as an essential being (the tenor).
Juxtaposition is a literary technique which causes the audience to compare two elements simply because they are placed next to each other. When the comparison is unexpected, it creates irony. In some cases, this can be created through grammatical ambiguity. For example, success and failure.
Name Definition Example Setting as a form of symbolism or allegory: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work of fiction; sometimes, storytellers use the setting as a way to represent deeper ideas, reflect characters' emotions, or encourage the audience to make certain connections that add complexity to how the story may be interpreted.
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 ...