Professor Green discusses irony in the medieval genre in which it is employed most frequently and with greatest sophistication, the romance. The book is written primarily from a Germanist's viewpoint but also takes account of novels by Chrétien de Troyes and their German adaptations, examples from the Tristan tradition in France and Germany, as well as works by Chaucer.

Despite the fashionable standing of irony in studies of modern literature and its occasional application to medieval studies in a number of recent works, no sustained analysis of this phenomenon has yet been attempted for medieval literature.