Jasper Fforde is a best-selling novelist who rose to prominence on the back of his 2001 debut novel, The Eyre Affair, which unleashed a time-travelling detective named Thursday Next into the unsuspecting world of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Since then, Fforde has written seven books in the same series, each one characterised by a playful approach to literary allusion, as well as several other novels and short stories.

As a new scientific study into the function of irony has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, we spoke to Fforde about the importance of irony in his work, and what science can (or can't) offer to our understanding of literature.

How central is irony in your own work?