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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 man" with a 1950 dissertation on "Tristram Shandy and Its Precursors: The Self Conscious Narrator," he has gone on in his four major books to analyze literature from the Middle Ages to the present, and to address problems as knotty and controversial as the relation between impersonal narration and its moral consequences, as detailed and intricate as how readers can detect and share the irony of an E. B. White or a Flannery O'Connor, as large and significant as the role of reason in the modern age of skepticism, and as complex and difficult as how different critical systems relate to one another. Booth has extended his range further in his numerous essays (a small portion of which are published along with some of his lectures in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me, 1970), where one discovers him talking, among other things, about freshman composition, censorship, the virtues and vices of grading, the challenge of feminist criticism, the difficulty of evaluating metaphors, the ethical value of reading fiction, the conflicts of interpretation, the scholar in society, as well as François Rabelais, James Joyce, Norman Mailer, George Eliot, and other writers, canonical and popular.
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