Irony

International audienceDuring the Renaissance, irony was seen as a macro-textual figure that could run through an entire discourse and/or as a trope (or microtextual figure), with irony being built on a succession of tropes. This classification issue – already present in Quintilian’s work – also appears in Antoine Fouquelin’s La rhétorique française (1555; French Rhetoric); while irony is among the tropes analyzed, the author also identifies a type of “extended” irony (Fouquelin, Antoine. La rhétorique française, Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance. Paris: Le livre de poche, 1990)