Since its publication in 1990, "Critical Terms for Literary Study" has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory – giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Signi...

This critically acclaimed collection is both a passionate celebration of teaching as a vocation and an argument for rhetoric as the center of liberal education. While Booth provides an eloquent personal account of the pleasures of teaching, he also v...

"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...

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...