Means of Expressing Irony in English Literature of the 21st Century

Summary The theme of this Master’thesis is the study of various linguistic ways of expressing irony in the contemporary English literature on the basis of Stephen Fry’s works. The linguistic manifestation of irony occurs on all linguistic levels: phonetic, lexical and syntactic. In this work, we make an attempt to classify certain examples of irony into different linguistic levels. The subject of the work is examples of linguistic irony in the novels and autobiography of Stephen Fry. The subject of the study is dialogues and monologues of the characters of novels and stories, monologues of the author himself, in which, first and foremost, irony is realized. The main goal of the work is to study the creation of irony in all language levels and analyze the ways of expressing it. To achieve the goal of this study, the following tasks are set: 1) Study the term "comic"; 2) Study irony as a concept, (definition and attributes); 3) Determine the place of irony in modern linguistics; 4) Consider the role of irony in fiction; 5) To study ways of expressing irony on the basis of examples taken from Stephen Fry’s works; 6) Classify examples into different language levels. In this paper works of E.V. Safonova, A.P. Skovorodnikova, M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.A. Kiryukhin were studied. The results of the linguistic analysis show that irony is a complex phenomenon that occurs on all language levels and is transmitted through various stylistic means, such as comparison, metaphor, personification, compression, etc. Linguistic analysis allows to identify what methods are most often used by the author. Key words: irony, fiction, linguistic analysis, linguistic means