Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-10T00:15:24.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Verbal Irony in Tom Jones

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Eleanor N. Hutchens
Eleanor N. Hutchens*
Affiliation:
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Ga.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Without its verbal irony, Tom Jones would be quite a different book: massive and well made but lacking the high polish and the effect of urbane control which do much to preserve it as a major classic. Its realism, its satire, and even its much-praised plot keep their unified brilliance through being governed by an ironic style that forms as important a contribution to the English novel as any Fielding made.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , 1962 , pp. 46 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 On the French influence, see Wayne C. Booth, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy,” PMLA, lxvii (1952), 163-185.

2 “‘Prudence’ in Tom Jones,” PQ, xxxix, 4 (October 1960), 496-507.

3 Some readers seem not to have the inward ear with which others hear whatever they silently read. To them, what is here called tonal irony may appear to be purely a matter of syntax or sentence structure.