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ROMANTIC IRONY

Romantic irony is most commonly associated with the Jena Romantics: the Schlegel brothers—August Wilhelm (1767–1 845) and Friedrich (1772–1 829)—Ludwig Tieck (1773–1 853), Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1 819) and Novalis (1772–1 801). The main source of the writings with regard to irony was the journal, Athenaeum, which in its brief history from 1798 to 1800 published a series of texts that crossed the genres of philosophy, literature, criticism and review and included a highly influential collection of fragments (Behler 1993). As the name Athenaeum indicates, the German Romantic movement valorised the ancient past, but like the English Romantics they were also entranced by Shakespeare, medievalism and certain key moderns, such as the French encyclopaedist Denis Diderot (1713–8 4) and the German proto-Romanticist J.W. Goethe (1749–1 832). What they were against, predominantly, was reason and the enlightenment restriction of reason to a universal human norm.

At the same time, they were aware of the paradoxes of a critique of reason. In order to argue against or challenge reason one needed to speak, but such speech would seem to demand understanding and would therefore rely on the very norms of reason it set out to delimit. The only possible response to this predicament would be irony: a speech which at once made a claim to be heard, but which also signalled or gestured to its own limits and incomprehension. While the Jena romantics were the group that came closest to offering a theory of irony, ‘Romantic irony’ has since been identified with Romanticism in general, with Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments often providing the theory through which English Romantic irony can be read (Alford 1984; Mellor 1980; Simpson 1979).