Title: Irony and Post-Enlightenment Poetics in John Banville’s The Newton Letter

Abstract: In The Newton Letter, contemporary Irish novelist John Banville employs irony as a narrative strategy to explore subjectivity, the efficacy of language, and temporal experience. Isaac Newton’s “letters,” as “a text within the text,” establish a parallel narrative structure that is continually being deconstructed. In the quest for Newton’s spirit of rationality, the narrator’s pursuit of self-realization instead falls into a cycle of irony. Irony is not merely a linguistic posture but an intrinsic structure of how human beings experience and perceive history. The work transforms the genre of scientific biography into a post-Enlightenment critique of reason, foregrounding its finitude and historical constructedness. Irony, in entering the Enlightenment discourse and dismantling its authority from within, enables the deconstruction and poetic reconstruction of Enlightenment rationality, historical narrative, and self-knowledge.

Keywords: John Banville, The Newton Letter, irony, post-Enlightenment, reason

Author: Shuang Zhang, Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.013