smoulder on for thirty years. What will be the population of London,or Manchester, or Chemnitz, or Bremen, or Milan, at the end of it?(Wallas, 1914, in Shaw, 1914/1931, p. 19)Here, the imperative—“Let a European War break out”—is ironic byany measure. Wallas’s words fit the common definition of irony as sayingthe opposite of what the writer apparently means. That was a widely helddefinition of irony in Shaw’s time. The Romantics had advocated a muchbroader view of irony during the 19th century, but the old inversion-of-meaning concept was more common, even among intellectuals. For exam-ple, inJokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud (1905/1960) definedirony as simply the technique of “representation by the opposite” (p. 86).Bythelate20thcentury,however,ironyhadtakenonbroadermeaning,reviving some 19th-century Romantic concepts with 20th-century twists.The result has been an array of concepts of irony that have been applied toliterature (e.g., Brooks, 1947; Wilde, 1981; Hutcheon, 1994); historiography(White, 1973); architecture (Venturi, 1977); philosophy (e.g., de Man, 1979;Rorty, 1989; Ankersmit, 1996); and Postmodern criticism (e.g., Hutcheon,1988, 1994; Lemert, 1992).Shavian criticism represents some of the changes in our concepts ofirony. During his long life Shaw was accused of being a “paradoxer” (Shaw,1898/1980b), but was rarely labeled an “ironist.” Shortly after Shaw’s death,in a collection of criticism about Shaw by some of the leading thinkers ofthe first half of the 20th century, irony was not emphasized. For example,G. K. Chesterton (1909/1953) wrote of Shaw’s wit:It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of sec-ondary age of wits; one of those interludes of prematurely old youngmen, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde wasitsgod....Oneofitsnotes was an artificial reticence of speech, whichwaited till it could plant the perfect epigram. (p. 28)In that same publication, W. H. Auden (1942/1953) described whatwe think of as Shavian irony as an antidote to logical fallacy: “He cannot,thank God, be serious for long: the more logical his argument, the morecertain he is to accompany it with a wink” (p. 155).By the late 20th century, in keeping with general theories of irony,Weintraub (1966/1970) referred to “the kinds of ironic wit Shaw loved”(p. 343); Fred Mayne (1967) compared the structure of Shavian drama toSocratic Irony, and literary critic Harold Bloom (1987) saw Shaw as “a craftyironist” (p. 8).Of course, history is seldom neat. During the war, Shaw himself wrotethat “the war is full of ironies” (letter to Dorothy Mackenzie, March 18,1918, in Laurence, 1985, p. 546). In other words, in examining Shaw’s ironic