Mocking the Devil: Persuasive Irony in C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters

This paper presents a stylistic analysis of the language of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942), a sardonic work of epistolary fiction consisting of letters from one demon to another. The text exploits irony, neologisms, bureaucratese, and other salient linguistic features to elucidate the spiritual, psychological, and moral mechanisms of temptation. Stylistics, understood here as a linguistically informed approach to the study of literary texts, offers the necessary tools to explore the salient lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic choices made within the text to account for the construction of meaning. Recent studies in style have explored the rhetorical and communicative functions of irony and satire (Leech, 2007; Fahnestock, 2011). Through both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper aims to account for the persuasive perlocutionary effect of the text’s ironic tone, paying particular attention to the formal and functional features of irony as a persuasive practice within Lewis’s unique work of apologetic fiction.