ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century the concept of irony in England, and, in other European countries, had scarcely evolved in its broad outlines beyond the point already reached in Quintilian. The new meanings are new in a number of respects which we can perhaps sort out, but what they add up to is as radical a transformation of the concept of irony as Romanticism was of the worldview of the previous centuries. The more important of the new meanings that the word ‘irony’ took on emerged out of the ferment of philosophical and aesthetic speculation that made Germany for many years the intellectual leader of Europe. The originality and strength of A. W. Schlegel’s thinking lay in his firm grasp of life as a dialectic process and his insistence that human behaviour is fully human only when it also exhibits an open dynamic dualism.
