Abstract :
Drawing on Robert Foulke and Paul Smith’s view of literary narratives in their An Anatomy of Literature, this paper explores how narrative irony intrudes on narrative romance. The purpose is to show how, from an archetypal perspective, narrative irony subverts the components of romance by exercising a blurring effect on the traditional romantic aspects such as the quest, the world of values and triumphant recovery. Foulke and Smith argue that these two narrative function most by implication rather than in a straight foreword fashion: “The narrative pattern is not identical with the observable features of the text but is implicit in them” (p. 3). This paper examines one prime literary example to illustrate the archetypal nature of narrative romance and irony. Additionally, it demonstrates, by exploring three short stories, from Joyce, Hawthorne and Welty, how narrative irony mocks narrative romance by mimicking its constituents.
