The Rhetoric of Fiction (Penguin literary criticism)

by WayneC.Booth (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $6.31

  How do novelists communicate with their readers and involve us with their characters? In this book, the author answers this question with analyses of many kinds of narrative - from Homer to Hemingway, from the Book of Job to James Joyce. He considers, for example, how Henry James uses unreliable narrators (who reveal far more than they are aware of), how Jane Austen controls our sympathy and judgement and how objective novelists such as Flaubert convey their beliefs and values as clearly as prophets like D.H.Lawrence.

• Used

  Paperback
  1961

  $7.60

• New

  Paperback
  1983

  $31.51

  The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms--such as the implied author, the postulated reader, and the unreliable narrator --have become part of the standard critical lexicon.

  For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years--two decades that Booth describes as the richest in the history of the subject.