This chapter describes the main themes of the volume, including “the scope of irony” (the diverse ways that irony is manifested in human experience), “irony’s impact” (e.g., the complex ways irony affects both personal and social life), “irony in linguistic communication,” “irony, affect, and related figures,” and “irony in expressive, multimodal contexts.” Taking a close look at chapters from different sections of the volume illustrates some of the incredibly diverse ways of studying, and writing, about irony in human life. We urge readers to pay close attention to the examples discussed, methods employed by different scholars, the way their arguments unfold, and their larger aims to address the ways irony and thought are closely intertwined. And we should remain open to being “shaken up” by what is read for the wide world of irony scholarship can disrupt our preconceived notions about the meaning and functions of irony exactly in the ways that irony itself can “piece illusions” about how we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

The emotions of frontline responders are traditionally viewed as problematic, because emotions are seen as distractive and impediments to an efficient pursuit of optimal crisis response outcomes. In addition, personal involvement in the situation might result in trauma since responders are often unable to prevent tragedy and suffering. Dissociation from the response, instead, might best enable responders to cope with traumatic experiences and avoid negative psychological consequences. Yet, compassion and altruism give meaning to their work for many responders and can improve their customized care to those in need. Detachment, moreover, is rarely fully effective. The emotional attitude of crisis responders, therefore, poses a dilemma. It is useful to note that emotions are diverse in nature and intensity. This means that there is room to explore how to manage emotions in such a way that feelings of empathy and involvement are enabled without responders succumbing to it. In any case, it requires unwavering organizational and team support.

This chapter charts the ultimate triumph of the emotional regime of scientific modernity in the form of antisepsis, Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory to surgical practice. It begins by exploring the ways in which antisepsis eliminated the patient as an emotional agent in surgery. The 1860s saw profound concern within surgery about the devastating impact of sepsis on post-operative mortality. Many of the explanations provided for this phenomenon rested on long-standing ideas about the role of the patient’s constitution and emotional state in regulating their post-operative health. However, by focusing purely on the condition of the wound, and the need to keep it free of ‘germs’, Lister’s antisepsis effectively overwrote these explanations, rendering patient subjectivity largely meaningless. At the same time, however, if emotions no longer possessed any ontological significance in surgery, the second part of this chapter demonstrates that they nonetheless played a powerful rhetorical function, as this ‘new world of surgery’ was configured in highly sentimentalised terms. This sentimentality not only served to counter widespread popular anxieties about surgery’s moral character, but also constructed Lister, the ultimate scientific surgeon and the emotional template for surgical modernity, as a quasi-divine saviour.

The theology and spirituality of Meister Eckhart remains a source of wisdom and controversy. This chapter outlines his spirituality in light of his scholastic views on intellect, and then considers in detail his celebrated notion of detachment.

Nineteenth-century literary realism develops alongside but is not identical to clinical medical realism. Recent scholarly work has focused, for good reason, on how literary and medical realisms overlapped during this period. However, it is useful also to consider some differences: dissimilarities in language (literary writers privileged spoken vernacular, while physicians developed a written rhetoric with a complex, specialized professional vocabulary), demography (literary realism largely chronicled the middle classes and respectable working people, while hospital-trained physicians wrote about poor urban patients), methodologies (medical men explored quantifiable data; literary realists continued to employ lengthy description), definitions of truth (medical reportage works to present a truthful portrayal of real events; literary rendering strives for a credible portrayal of fictional ones), and relation to the balance of detachment and sympathy (clinical physicians believed that detachment underwrites medical progress, although they did not always deny their sensibilities, often turning to literary realism or romance to manage such moments rhetorically). This chapter argues that medical and literary writers, attempting to negotiate, overcome, or uphold these key differences, defined what it meant for Victorians to tell the truth, well aware that all realism is a representation, and representation is only an approximation of the real.

Chapter 7 turns to daimonification in the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (205–270 CE). Porphyry presented Plotinus as already a daimon while on earth. This presentation partially depends on Plotinus’s own teachings: the one who becomes a daimon in heaven already was one on earth. This presentist focus was shaped by a reading of Empedocles and Plato – the daimon is one’s higher consciousness into which one lives. In his theory of daimonification, Plotinus emphasized ethical and contemplative practices. Purifying virtues disengaged the higher consciousness from the “conglomerate” of the body and the lower mind. When one’s higher mind is free from bodily images, one can live at the level of the daimon.

This chapter locates a new cultural anxiety in the late nineteenth century about the woman who under-identifies, that is, refuses or is simply incapable of a feminine standard of emotional identification with literature. The expression of this anxiety, in New Woman novels of the fin de siècle and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, reveals the ways in which identification can both reinforce and subvert gender categories. In these novels, and in sources ranging from proceedings of the British Medical Association to humor magazines, Victorian commentators blamed women’s apparent detachment from literary identification on the professionalization of their reading, and attributed its symptoms to a kind of sickness or blighted fertility. Women’s emotional disinvestment from literature was depicted as not merely wayward but pathological. More than a century of overt crises about the management of female identification culminated in the fear that women might not emotionally identify with literature at all, validating the book’s larger argument that irrational identification had come to define femininity itself.

In this chapter, I explore the representation of affect in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). These texts, on first sight, seem to reflect a notably affectless narration, yet here I argue that this absence of affect is itself felt to be a crisis, one which the character or narrator struggles to recognise or articulate. In these comparable invocations of emotional removal, disregard and isolation, set in a contemporary context of high speed connection, these writers thus facilitate a new articulation of crisis within the global neoliberal order, making visible a return to elapsed and displaced actualities. They contribute, in this way, to what has been called a ‘new sincerity’ within twenty-first century writing, though their understandings of this project often highlight an ironic affective separation from immediate surroundings.

Chapter 8 scrutinizes why actors should embed themselves in the arena in the first place and when they prefer detaching from everyday security. The question of embedding or detaching is particularly relevant to newly arriving peacekeepers but also poses itself to national militaries. Embedding into the arena forces an actor to engage in fluid ordering as everyday contact and spontaneous security events necessitate immediate reactions. Detachment, on the other hand, allows for more organized and directed engagement of the security arena through stable ordering. However, detachment can fuel rumours and allegations thereby deteriorating the overall security situation. Actors become torn between fulfilling local demands for robust intervention by accepting fluidity, on the one hand, and meeting international demands of stable ordering through detachment, on the other.