ABSTRACT
Getting to grips with irony seems to have something in common with gathering the mist; there is plenty to take hold of if only one could. To attempt a taxonomy of a phenomenon so nebulous that it disappears as one approaches is an even more desperate adventure. In seeking to define irony or distinguish its several kinds one can quite legitimately look at it from many different angles. But it is precisely this that explains the chaos which the terminology of irony presents. The concept of irony is also obscured by the frequent and close conjunction of irony with satire and with such phenomena as the comic, the grotesque, the humorous, and the absurd. As a result, there is a tendency to define irony in terms of the qualities of these other things, some of which defy definition even more successfully than irony. As a subject for discussion irony is more than a set of conceptual and methodological problems.
