THE RHETORIC OF FICTION (Pages 303-316) by Dr. Sushant Chaturvedi in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

A number of scholars have been drawn to Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. In fact responses have continued even till the twenty-first century. Walter Jost, Robert D. Denham, Eric Gilder, James Phelan, Dan Shen, and Arnt Lykke Jacobsen are some scholars who have published articles directly related to The Rhetoric of Fiction in journals in the decade 2001-2010. Apart from these there are books published in the twenty-first century that have devoted some pages to this book and its significance. The number of articles published in the decades just before the turn of the century is of an even greater number. For a book written in 1961 to have received so much attention till the current time is no small matter. Anyone who writes on the theory of fiction now or even in the next several decades to come cannot ignore Booth. Scholars can disagree with Booth in order to raise their academic reputation, but they cannot ignore him, or indeed should not, if they are writing on the theory of fiction. Such has been the impact of this single book on the theory of fiction. It is high time someone puts together Booth’s ideas along with the critical responses he has received. One of the significant contributions of this paper can be seen to be in this direction. Key Words: Rhetoric, kind of perception, showing, realism, dramatic rendering, romantic emotionalism, literal naturalism etc.