The Essential Wayne Booth

Product DescriptionWayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts.While Booths work was formative to the study of literature, his essential writings have never been collected in a single volumeuntil now. Selected by Walter Jost in collaboration with Booth himself, the texts anthologized here present a picture of this indispensable critics contributions to literary and rhetorical studies. The selections range from memorable readings of Macbeth, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James to engagements with Booths intellectual heroes, such as Richard McKeon and Mikhail Bakhtin. But rhetoric, Booths abiding concern as a critic and thinker, provides the organizing principle of the anthology. The Essential Wayne Booth illuminates the scope of Booths rhetorical inquiry: the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another. Whether about metaphors for our friendship with books or the two cultures of science and religion, the texts collected here always return to the techniques and ethics of our ways of communicating with each otherthat is, to rhetoric.The Essential Wayne Booth is a capstone to Booth's long career and an eloquent reminder of the ways in which criticism can make us alive to the arts of writing, talking, and listening.Review'[This collection] captures the broad range of Booth's subjects, from ethics, popular culture, and teaching, to Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Mikhail Bakhtin. His invigorating and earnestly joyful style of writing matches hjis intense depth and breadth of reading. . . . His essays excite us because he so lucidly takes us along on his explorations.' Ania Wieckowski Virginia Quarterly ReviewAbout the AuthorWayne C. Booth (19212005) was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His many books include The Rhetoric of Fiction and For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, both published by the University of Chicago Press.Wayne C. Booth (19212005) was the George Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His many books include The Rhetoric of Fiction, A Rhetoric of Irony, The Power and Limits of Pluralism, The Vocation of a Teacher, and Forthe Love of It, all published by the University of Chicago Press.Walter Jost is professor of English at the University of Virginia.