ABSTRACT
The word “irony” originates from “Eiron”, the name of a clown in an ancient Greek comedy. Nearly all classic literary works are more or less ironic, and in Western culture, irony even represents a kind of philosophy or attitude on life. Irony has quite a long history in the West, dating back to the period of ancient Greek civilization, and at the time of its origin, it established its position both in rhetoric and in philosophy. Romantic irony is clearly a successor of Socratic irony. Both desire to seek truth in the soul of the self and to manifest the truth with the help of the contradiction and negation of irony. The new critical irony also directly inspires Kenneth Burk, the leading theorist of the New Rhetoric. Irony arises when tries, through the interaction of terms upon another, to produce a development which uses all terms.
