The Comedy of Romantic Irony

Few literary concepts evoke the kind of perplexity engendered by a more than passing acquaintanceship with romantic irony. In Comedy of Romantic Irony, Morton Gurewitch argues that European romantic irony, shorn of the excessively capacious and somewhat nebulous aspects of German romantic-ironic theory, is essentially a comedy of ambivalence, a comic tug-of-war between genuine romantic idealism and authentic antiromantic disenchantment. Gurewitch claims, moreover, that European romantic irony, which is found in writers ranging from Byron and Heine to Flaubert and Dostoevsky, is romanticism’s unique contribution to the history of literary comedy.