ABSTRACT
As the author herself explicitly states, the main objective of this book is to map Søren Kierkegaard's ironic attitude and style by reading his pseudonymous works in order to reveal the existence of the personality hiding behind the authorial masks and the deeper meaning of his texts which remain elusive for the average reader. This excitingly eclectic approach is based on dominant models of aesthetics and literary studies. The book has three main pillars and consists of three parts, accordingly. Part One begins with a short overview of the historical precursors of Kierkegaard's concept of irony, tracing them back to the central figure of Socrates. But Part Two makes it evident that the concept of irony can only be understood if we keep the necessary distance from the relevant theories of Danish and German Romanticism. In Part Three, the chapter devoted to authorship opens with a historical outline of the use of pseudonyms.
