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 as offering "a fuller development and more specific applications of the general approach to critical problems outlined" in his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, but Booth has in fact achieved a broadening of Neo-Aristotelian theory that amounts to wholesale revision. Nevertheless, The Rhetoric of Fiction opens with the particular distinction among literary "kinds" most fundamental to the Neo-Aristotelians. The very first paragraph of the Preface, with its insistent differentiation of "didactic" from "non-didactic," employs Chicago terminology, even though for the orthodox "imitative" Booth substitutes "non-didactic"; the works he cites as "didactic" are among the handful cited in earlier Chicago criticism as convenient examples of the "didactic." (pp. 137-38)
Booth's aim in The Rhetoric of Fiction was of course much more specific than I have indicated—he was working with the problem of "the author's voice" in fiction—and I cannot claim that he was consciously attempting the radical "broadening" of Neo-Aristotelianism I have stressed. Given his care to argue that his concept of "rhetoric" is merely an expansion of Aristotle's,… Booth obviously sees his own work as the sort of extension and refinement of Aristotle's method that Crane has urged and has asserted The Rhetoric of Fiction has helped to supply. What I am concerned with, however, is the actual effect this work has on Chicago theory. The problem of "the author's voice" that Booth grapples with provides the most convenient way not only into his conscious aim but also into the actual reorientation of Chicago theory he brings about, for although he appears to be reacting to fiction criticism deriving from James, he is in reality challenging what for Crane is central, "the imitative principle itself." (p. 138)
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