Chapter 2 provides an overview of how emoticons and emojis are a human adaptation to online written conversation to compensate for the absence of non-verbal cues and physical context, but also an affordance of most written conversation to promote affiliation, creativity and play. The analysis highlights the role of emojis as ‘attendant activities’ (Jefferson, 1987) which express politeness (and impoliteness) and other pragmatic functions, including prosocial and anti-social behaviours, identities, contextualizations (physical/virtual), irony and meaning enhancement. By analysing the multiple, often overlapping interactional functions of emoticons and emojis, this chapter provides original insights into the unique role of emojis in children’s written conversation, highlighting some major differences between spoken and written interaction. Findings indicate that emojis fulfil interactional functions which go beyond simply replacing fundamental non-verbal, voice and contextual resources which are available to speakers in phone and face-to-face interaction. While further research in this area is required across different age groups and genders, the various categories of emojis identified in this chapter provide a comprehensive account of how children are likely to deploy and respond to these symbols in online interaction, and how multiple meanings are possible depending on the interactional context

The novel of ideas was rejected by British-based modernist writers. In the international literary sphere there was less hostility to the fictional representation of philosophical, political and religious ideas, and there was also significant critical discussion of literature as a specific kind of speculative thinking. Outside Britain the representation of ideas and the formal experimentations of the modern novel were not seen as being in conflict with one another. Writers at the forefront of developments in the novel, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Rabindranath Tagore and Jean-Paul Sartre were both formally experimental and engaged with the novelistic implications of philosophical, religious or political thought. In this chapter I consider two kinds of modern novels of ideas, the ironic and the dialogistic. I focus on the writing of John Galsworthy in relation to Thomas Mann’s ironic Buddenbrooks and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory in relation to André Malraux’s dialogistic La Condition Humaine.

John D. Lyons examines some of the most canonical works of the seventeenth-century Golden Age: Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) and Rodogune (1644–45), and Racine’s Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677), proposing that the decisive actions of these plays often hinge on what women say, or do not say. This is far from surprising since these works are contemporaneous with two important interrelated cultural developments in the public lives of women: increasingly, they hosted Parisian salons and gaining increased importance in the political, cultural and social spheres; and in a century that witnessed attempts to standardize and refine the French language, these salons run by women became virtual workshops for formulating rules of discourse for a worldly, non-pedantic society. Tragedies from this period, perceived as the dramatic representation of the lives of kings, queens and princes, simultaneously display the sharp contrast between what can women say in public, what they conceal owing to the constraints on what they are allowed to say, and their awareness that what they say in public can have fatal consequences. These tragedies enable an appreciation of the aptness of Roland Barthes’ assertion that language, more than death, is the core of the tragic.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

‘Critical reception after 1900’ surveys latter-day critical responses to Goldsmith’s works, in which the vocabulary of ineffable genius and a tendency to biographical criticism have given way to newer emphases on irony and sincerity, poetics of place and space, intellectual history and Enlightenment, and Irish cultural and political history.

Campbell and Freire rely on an understanding of symbolic action that is not merely instrumental but expressive. Rather than thinking that “the ends justify the means,” these authors consider which messages are conveyed by the means they use and ask whether these implicit messages are conducive to their ultimate ends. In Chapter 4, I analyze how Søren Kierkegaard uses this reasoning to develop an innovative approach to communication that avoids being co-opted by misleading philosophies. A direct, confrontational approach, Kierkegaard reasoned, only serves to confirm people in their illusions, therefore writers need to create opportunities for readers to examine their own lives. I explain the benefits of criticism that transcends “us versus them” binaries and therefore demands interlocutors re-evaluate their categories.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

Chapter 6 suggests that the relevance-theory notion of cognitive effect be supplemented with the new notion of affective effect. We propose two different types of affective effect: primary affective effects, which typically act as input to inferential processes, and secondary affective effects, which are typically the output of inferential processes. Primary affective effects come in two flavours: anticipatory effects and transfer effects. The first of these are those effects which prepare an individual for a course of action; the latter are communicative, and inextricably linked with the interpretation of natural codes, inherently communicative behaviours which are ‘natural’ in the sense of Grice. In the case of secondary affective effects, propositional descriptions give rise to affective effects which rest on the imaginative abilities of the hearer/reader. This happens typically with literature and poetry. Emotions, we argue, appear to be a central contributor to persuasion, and we suggest this is so because of the special relationship that exists between affective and cognitive effects within the domain of achieving relevance.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

This chapter focuses on the canonical essays that theorized in real time the new stylistic and thematic tendencies in American postmodern fiction. Since the late 1960s, prominent practitioners of postmodernist fiction have been at the forefront of critical debates over contemporary American narrative. From the 1960s to the 1990s, brilliant authors such as Raymond Federman, John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and David Foster Wallace engaged in essayistic reflections on the problem of innovation in American fiction, including Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Despite differences and generational distance, in some of their best essayistic writing these writers often focused on the (old) problem of “the new” in art, reframed as a discourse on the making or unmaking of the postmodernist aesthetic in response to a supposed exhaustion of literary language. They did so from a liminal position, namely from the ambivalent stance of the writer-critic, and ended up producing some of the most penetrating essays on contemporary American literature during this period, indelibly marking an era in the history of the American essay.

While linguistic creativity is an essential feature of those who actively create instances of verbally expressed humor (VEH), awareness of context is equally indispensable. Humor is primarily cognitive, so it follows that language is the lowest common denominator between speaker/writer and receiver, in order for a joke, pun, quip, etc., to achieve its goal and, above all, to be recognized as being humorous in intent. However, over and above familiarity with the formal rules of a common language between interactants, successfully transmitted humor is also context dependent. Context involves both adherence to pragmatic rules and the recipient’s sociocultural encyclopedia. And if these two elements were not sufficient, humor also embroils the issue of sense of humor and the moral closeness/distance of our recipient to the object of our humor in order for it to be considered benign.

This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.

Reading Byron's dramas through the conceptual framework of modern play theory helps us appreciate the works of 1820–2 as a unique experimental project. If we focus on Byron’s transgressive playfulness both in terms of genre expectations and the ethos of his original sources (ranging from the Bible and the apocrypha to historical accounts and popular fictional narratives), we may disambiguate some of the more persistent critical quandaries, such as Byron's unsystematic thinking or lack of dramatic rigueur. Rather than aloof carelessness, these dramas clearly attest to Byron’s critical insight into the limits of the authoritative, be it religious or historical, and form a key part of his lifelong exploration of liberty, where the personal is inextricably linked to the political. Play, and playing, for Byron, is one of the key concepts of cultural history.

This chapter covers major late period works, which are in many ways increasingly more twenty-first century rather than eighteenth or nineteenth century: full of contradictions and energy.

Byron's satire of Robert Southey's Vision of Judgment, a Poet Laureate elegy and political settling of scores, upends Southey's Tory preening with liberal political satire, but also supplements this anti-type with unexpected twinning, especially against the unnamed figure of pure principle, the pseudonymous Junius.

Kant’s famous comparison of his transcendental critique to a revolution serves as the departure point for Nicolas Halmi’s chapter, which also explores the powerful conjunction between philosophy, criticism, and poetry in early German and British Romanticism, marked by acute self-consciousness. Halmi first discusses changes in the concept of revolution, and how the new meaning lent itself to politics and to philosophy, which both sought to give the subject greater autonomy and self-governance. He then examines different theories developed in response to Kant but also to the Revolution and its perceived failure, many of which call for a moral and intellectual revolution of the self as a preparation for democratic reform. These include Fichte’s theory of scientific knowledge, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Friedrich Schlegel’s transcendental poetry, and Shelley’s defence of the poetic imagination as a source of moral sympathy. Key ideas presented in the chapter include Bildung, the Absolute, Wechselerweis, romantic irony, and allegory. Halmi concludes with a section on Wordsworth’s poetic reform in the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that it emerged as a conservative reaction to revolution.

Chapter 7 explores the concept of nihilism in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. While the Danish thinker examines the issue in several different texts, this chapter is confined to his treatments in The Concept of Irony, the “Diapsalmata” from Either/Or, and “At a Graveside” from his collection Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. In the first work he criticizes the different forms of Romantic irony that can be seen as expressions of nihilism. Kierkegaard’s critical point is that the Romantics offer nothing positive after they have eliminated all truths and values with their negative critique. In the “Diapsalmata” he provides a portrait of the modern nihilist in the aphorisms of the anonymous aesthete. Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside” focuses on the issue of death and what kind of a disposition one should have towards it. He introduces the concept of the earnestness of death, which means thinking about one’s own demise. He claims that death is both indefinable and inexplicable, and thus it is important not to pretend that we know anything about it. One should thus remain in “the equilibrium of indecisiveness,” although this is difficult.