Does this sentence sound right?

It's extremely literay, and sounds like something from the Jane Austen-era of writing. I'm not quite sure what "a sense of self-irony" is, but basically:

He felt their disdain for him, and later on, it usually gave him a sense of self-irony, but it wasn't a truly terrible feeling.

 

 

 I find your sentence very satisfactory. It may be Jane Austenish but there is no law against such language even today. Why should everybody speak and write in exactly the same way in English? People don't do that in many other languages. I see no mistakes in punctuation or hyphens but I know one native forum member who would consider the sentence incorrect because it contains a relative clause from which the relative pronoun has been omitted even though it is the subject of the clause: Their disdain rarely failed to evoke in him a delayed sense of self-irony [which/that was] not at all fatal in nature.

CB 

Thanks for all the input. Everyone needs a little help sometimes... after all, no man is an island :)

I agree with Cool Breese; everyone has their own style. Besides, people still read classics these days and, to my knowledge, there has been no great effort to 'translate' every one of them into modern English...so why should everyone write like Stephen King?

When I write, I have no specific audience in mind in terms of ethnicity. I am a Finn living in Thailand, and I interact with people of all nationalities, each of which have their own ways of speaking 'English'. I would feel a little hypocritical even trying to find some universally 'correct' way of writing. Anyways, to me this is just a hobby, a time consuming and deranging one, perhaps, but a hobby nonetheless, which, on the other hand, is a pitiful excuse, but an excuse nonetheless.

 As for the question: what is self-irony?

Good point. I guess that's what I was trying to define in the text around that sentence. I can't express it clearly yet, though... For me, writing is a painfully subconscious process. All I can do is listen and write; the idea usually develops on the go. On the other hand, to me this seems a somewhat universal phenomenon that underlines what Freud said about the subconscious..

Anyway, I looked into it and self-irony does yield some hits on Google, in both English and Finnish. I found this mention of self-irony from an obscure website:

"Around the millennial shift Self-irony has permeated youth culture. Since identities have become more and more fragmented, young people often distance themselves from self. With global media and cross-culture relations self-irony becomes the only fixed position. However, this has been criticised from modernist theorists, claiming that tradition and rationality are not beeing disintegrated, but has only shifted on the surface. ... "

 It all seems to fit together, somehow. I can't still say how exactly...and right now I'm too exasperated by some unwriterly mood to keep going. I'll just let this puzzle sleep for a while...

Again, thanks for the input!