Dickens, Welty, and Turgenev are only three of the master storytellers in Angels and Outcasts. This remarkable collection of 14 short stories offers insights into what it means to be deaf in a hearing world. The book is divided into three parts: the...

"Against Theory", the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge – issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in "Critical Inquiry" (8:4) – strikes some...

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 fictiona...

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered b...

Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony", and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by ana...

When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that...