THERE ARE HANDBOOKS of literary terms, then there's Linda Hutcheon. Although she isn't proceeding alphabetically, she is working her way through terminological terrain grown thick with sometimes-contradictory meanings. In various earlier books such as The Politics of Postmodernism and Theory of Parody, Hutcheon redefines parody, narrative, and postmodernism. In Irony's Edge, from her academic perch or ledge -- though not out on a limb -- she examines irony.

Hutcheon's strengths are the clarity of her prose and the thoroughness of her research. While these aren't the tools of an ironist, who works with language's ambiguities, its cracks and fissures, its variable and sometimes unpredictable effects on readers or listeners, they are useful to Hutcheon, who operates as both teacher and translator in her writing. Too nice to wield irony -to be edgy, in other words -- which irony doesn't need because it says what it doesn't, she recapitulates the meanings of irony and homes in on its currently influential qualities.

Why the interpretive boom in these academic lean times, or rather, why the softcover surveys in our era of hard bucks, not hard covers? The answer is that words have histories -- as much as we do -- and those histories are emphasized differently in different periods. One of Hutcheon's major emphases in Irony's Edge is that, like much else at this postmodern moment, irony has been radically revalued and reinterpreted.

Still pithily defined as saying one thing and meaning another, irony has recently come to be grasped more in terms of its receiver or interpreter than its producer. In the modem era (a.k.a. those days before everyone's favorite question was whether or not Madonna was her image), irony was a stable, useful instrument. As Hutcheon notes, it was less involved "with provoking emotions than with equilibrating them." As one of the definers of traditional irony, whom Hutcheon cites, wrote: "One is conscious of contradictions but is above being frustrated by them; rather one includes them in a single perception of living beauty."

Oh, for the good old days of "one," eh? (I'm being ironic here, or didn't you notice?) Well, now we're "many" instead of "one." Hutcheon seizes upon this to stake out her turf and mark its difference: Irony's Edge is about "something that 'happens' rather than something that simply exists." Irony is a "culturally shaped process"; its interest lies mostly in its effect on what Hutcheon calls "discursive communities."

In ironic discourse the communicative process is not only "altered and distorted" but also made possible by those different worlds to which each of us differently belongs and which form the basis of the expectations, assumptions, and preconceptions that we bring to the complex processing of discourse, of language in use.

The communities important to the perception and valuing of irony are shaped most especially by race, gender, and sexual orientation -- which, not incidentally, are vital to the contemporary reading of literary criticism and culture. Thus, Hutcheon's, which is to say our, irony is less predictable and (yes) more political, contested, and even divisive than earlier ironies. (The preceding statement itself can be interpreted ironically.)

Irony's Edge, though laden with references to the voluminous definitions that contribute to Hutcheon's overview and reassessment, contains only the occasional academic "black hole" (scholarly shorthand, such as "Bakhtinian dialogism" and "Burkean dramatism," deciphered on enrollment in graduate school). Otherwise, the early part of the book consists of a taxonomy of irony's functions that is nuanced but readable. From there one gets, to my mind, some examples of irony drawn from diverse arts that, though carefully articulated, tend to get bogged down in minutiae. Hutcheon's aim here is at eclecticism, but the reader eager to absorb the multi-layered ironies of Kenneth Branagh's film Henry V may not drool at the prospect of dissecting the creation and reception of Anselm Kiefer's photography and painting.

In the final chapter, "The End(s) of Irony: The Politics of Appropriation," Hutcheon gets closer to examining the disruptiveness of postmodern irony in ways that can engage an extended public. Her case study here is the infamous 1989- 90 exhibition, "Into the Heart of Africa," at the Royal Ontario Museum. Hutcheon discusses the curator's intended ironic material, as well as the exhibition's unintended ironies, which left many people unhappy. The museum and the university as institutions are also "ironized." Thus readers of Irony's Edge realize that they are getting the analysis of someone who is herself from a specific discursive community.