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 of the type. Starting out as an "eighteenth century...

As most readers of this journal will know by now, Wayne C. Booth passed away in October of 2005. We will do a special issue of Narrative on his legacy for the field of narrative studies that is now planned for Spring 2007. Here...

The Essential Wayne Booth, edited by Walter Jost. Chicago, July 2006. $35 A leading literary critic of the twentieth century, Wayne C. Booth meticulously explored rhetoric and its control over our reading (and daily) experience. This collection of previously published essays (compiled by...

[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 novel, though most of his book is about novels) ensure that the reader takes the intended view of his story? But there are, of course, other questions to be got out of the way before this central question can be asked: for example, we must consider the case of the writer who denies that he intends the reader to take a particular view of his stor...

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, and the invalid. I say invalid because even those reviews worth reading are somewhat beside the point, in that what they find to praise is mostly Booth's criticism of individual works. His analyses are, admittedly, sometimes very good (although they are sometimes bad as well); but The Rhetoric of Fiction asks to be taken as a contributio...

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 attempt at "placing" it according to its general critical and theoretical orientation. Although this procedure may seem to risk forcing Booth into a Neo-Aristotelian bed of Procrustes, it will actually turn out to provide a way of assessing his originality and independence. The late R. S. Crane has referred to The Rhetoric of Fiction ...