Professor Booth spends some time on the definition of irony [in A Rhetoric of Irony]: it is present, according to his account, when the surface meaning of a passage must be rejected, and another, incongruous, and "higher" meaning must be reached by reconstructing the evidence. He finds unacceptable any definition which is too wide to be specifically useful; such as Cleanth Brooks's in The Well Wrought Urn, where irony is "the most general term we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context". Professor Booth disapproves of this account because it makes every day an open season, sets every reader hunting. He prefers a strict definition, partly in the hope of keeping the operation of irony under control. Thereafter, he distinguishes between ironies stable and unstable. Stable ironies are those which are covert, intended, finite in application, and fixed...