If the renaissance man can be identified by the depth and success of his forays into the different areas of knowledge that he declares within his province, then Wayne C. Booth is a striking exemplar o...
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Critical Essay by Milton A. Mays
Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction has had exceptionally favorable reviews. These reviews, it seems to me, fall into two classes; the merely unintelligent, ...
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Critical Essay by William Empson
[A Rhetoric of Irony] is a good book. It quotes a number of long examples, arguing from them in detail "how we manage to share ironies and why we often do not,...
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Critical Essay by Philip Stevick
Everything is to be said for working patiently through the stages of one's subject, especially when one's subject has been as shabbily done as Wayne Boo...
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Critical Essay by John Ross Baker
In the past The Rhetoric of Fiction has been properly enough read mostly as a work about prose fiction, but the book's importance is such as to warrant an att...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Culler
Wayne Booth wants literary critics to be pluralists, not champions of a single method. A pluralist believes that "two or more conflicting positions may be ent...
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Critical Essay by William E. Cain
This review violates the first commandment of book reviewing: do not criticize an author for failing to give us a book he never intended to write. But I see no getti...
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Critical Essay by Morse Peckham
Professor Booth has written [Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism] in a relaxed, personal, and occasionally self-indulgent style, and I shall dis...
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Critical Essay by Michael Fischer
Wayne C. Booth avoids anchoring his argument in the needs of criticism at the present time, but his fascination with critical freedom explains why he has to justify ...
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Critical Essay by Monroe C. Beardsley
[In the past], vigorous debates about what criticism is and ought to have been conducted under the rules of sporting competition: each combatant plays to win and...
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Critical Essay by Mark Roberts
[The following is a primary concern in The Rhetoric of Fiction]: How does the writer of fiction (and Professor Booth does not ignore types of fiction other than the nov...
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Critical Essay by Alan D. Mckillop
[The Rhetoric of Fiction] makes good the claim on the dust jacket that it offers "the most significant analysis of the novelist's art" since Pe...
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Critical Essay by Scott Elledge
[Wayne Booth does not predict in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me] how the great confrontation [between those who want to capture the universities and those who ...
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Critical Essay by Thomas W. Benson
Anyone who has written so useful a book as The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) deserves an especially attentive audience from readers of this journal. But rhetoricians l...
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Critical Essay by Kenneth Burke
It is gratifying to read so calm and academically mellow a book [as A Rhetoric of Irony] in days like these when so much is hurried and harried and always going awry. ...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
Professor Booth spends some time on the definition of irony [in A Rhetoric of Irony]: it is present, according to his account, when the surface meaning of a passage m...
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Critical Essay by George Mcfadden
Even though Wayne Booth claims only a secondary concern for critical theory, [The Rhetoric of Irony] is bound to interest us because of the importance of his Rhetori...
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Critical Essay by Robert Buffington
In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent Booth engages the modern mind and its dualisms. It is an exciting book, not in the way that it proceeds—though mu...
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Wayne C(layson) Booth
Critical Essay by Milton A. Mays
