Robert Browning's romantic irony in The ring and the book

This study is a reading of Robert Browning as an ironist in the tradition of the German Romanticist Friedrich Schlegel, who coined the term "Romantic irony." Specifically, Patricia Diane Rigg considers historicity or historical truth in Browning's The Ring and the Book by distinguishing between the processes of representation and re-presentation within the context of Romantic irony.

In the framing monologues, the Poet seems to blur the distinction between representing (embodying or symbolizing) and re-presenting (offering anew) the truth-telling process that shapes the narrative of the poem. Rigg's premise is twofold: first, Browning tells "a truth obliquely," deliberately using language to subvert truth and to reveal it simultaneously; second, truth is linked not to a fixed text but to authorial and reader production of that text.

In the language of Romantic irony, The Ring and the Book is "organized chaos," revealing history in terms of "becoming" rather than "being" and revealing historical truth as process rather than as product.