Swift: the metamorphosis of irony -- Fielding: satiric and comic irony -- Sterne: the novelist as jester -- Gibbon: dismissive irony -- Peacock: the wand of enchantment -- Thackeray: an irony against heroes -- Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn and the whole truth -- Samuel Butler: the honest sceptic -- Oscar Wilde: irony of a socialist aesthete -- Lytton Strachey: the technique of debunking -- Aldous Huxley: and the two nothings -- Evelyn Waugh: and the mysteriously disappearing hero -- Orwell: irony as prophecy
