Linda Hutcheon

Hutcheon's publications reflect an interest in aesthetic micro-practices such as irony in Irony's Edge (Routledge, 1994), parody in A Theory of Parody (Meuthen, 1985), and adaptation in A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006). Hutcheon has also authored texts which synthesize and contextualize these practices with regard to broader debates about postmodernism, such as The Politics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1989), A Poetics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1988), and Rethinking Literary History (OUP, 2002). She also edited influential texts on post-modernity, chief among them being A Postmodern Reader (SUNY, 1993), co-edited with Joseph P. Natoli.

Hutcheon argues irony is a "...semantically complex process of relating, differentiating, and combining said and unsaid meanings - and doing so with an evaluative edge" that is enabled by membership in what she describes as "discursive communities". It is through membership in a shared discursive community that the listener is able to recognize that a speaker might be attempting offer an unsaid evaluation. She argues that Canadians lack of a clear nationalist metanarrative and international influences such as history as a British colony, proximity to the United States of America, and immigration, are disposed to seeing their identities as ironic – caught up in multiple discursive communities. For Hutcheon's work on ethnic minority writing see Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fiction. Eds. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond. (Oxford U.P. 1990).

Since the mid-1990s, Linda Hutcheon has published a number of books on opera with her husband Michael Hutcheon. These works often reflect her interests as a literary critic combined with his interests as a practicing physician and medical researcher.

Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, O.C. (born August 24, 1947) is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.