In The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation, Frank Stringfellow, Jr., a professor of English, explicates the irony in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Kafka's The Trial to demonstrate that “only a perspective that relies on the rich insights of psychoanalysis can fully expose the potent and latent meanings of this recurrent form of human expression” (p. 151). This work will interest many clinicians, since, as the author points out, irony has not much been written about in the psychoanalytic literature, perhaps because it was touched on by Freud only as a “rationally chosen technique” (p. 2), a form of discourse in which “one means the opposite of what one says” (p. 1). In contrast, Stringfellow explores irony as a complex compromise formation with clinical, as well as rhetorical, significance.

It is gratifying to see psychoanalysis applied so thoughtfully to literary study, though these days academic criticism is often marred by stylistic mannerisms that Stringfellow does not fully