The Encyclopedia of the Novel - Peter Melville Logan 2014

Rhetoric and Figurative Language

Aaron McKain and Trevor Merrill

Defining a 2,500-year-old literary tradition in 2,000 words is a difficult task; doubly so when that tradition has spent so much of its time haggling over its own meaning. But that is the task of this entry, and “rhetoric,” despite its wide and narrow definitions, does provide many, more or less agreed upon, talking points and touchstones. The first—and it is a first that, as is the case throughout this entry, comes first conceptually, not chronologically—is Aristotle's (384—324 BCE) On Rhetoric, the treatise which provides the definition of rhetoric now familiar to two millennia of students, “the art of seeing the available means of persuasion in any given situation” (bk. I).

So what is this “art” of persuasion? For Aristotle, it is an investigation into how to move and convince audiences, both within the context of political occasions (e.g., the law courts, legislative assemblies, and official ceremonies) and with the use of particular types of evidence (particular appeals to emotion, or logic, or credibility). How do audiences come to accept or reject a speaker? How do speakers persuade or dissuade their audiences? What are the aesthetic, affective, and ideological consequences of speakers' rhetorical choices and audiences' judgments of them? These are the questions an Aristotelian approach to rhetoric asks. And they are the questions (though not necessarily the terminological methods) at the heart of the rhetorical approach to literature, an approach made most overt, and most famous, in the twentieth century by Wayne C. Booth with his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and by the work of Kenneth Burke and Mikhail bakhtin. This approach was carried forward most forcefully into the twenty-first century by the “third generation” of Chicago School rhetorical critics, most notably James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. But how do we get from the polis of ancient Greece to contemporary English Studies? What are the nuances of a rhetorical approach to literature? How do we account for the ever-expanding (and contracting) role of rhetoric within the field of literary studies? Exploring these questions requires us to treat the study of rhetoric itself rhetorically. So, with a nod to Stephen Mailloux's “rhetorical hermeneutics”—which advocates using “rhetoric to practice theory by doing history”—the short synopsis that follows will consider how and when the rhetorical approach to literature (and its evolving methodological and epistemological presuppositions) became persuasive within particular intellectual and material moments in the history of English Studies.

Our “rhetorical hermeneutics” of rhetoric begins with a thorny binary central to rhetorical scholarship: the longstanding (and, in contemporary departments of English, still standing) distinction, if not outright division, between the study of rhetoric and the study of literature. This is a complex relation with ancient roots. Aristotle himself separates the study of dramatic texts (dealt with in his Poetics) from “rhetorical” texts (the civic communication outlined in On Rhetoric), despite the distinction failing to hold in his actual readings of texts (e.g., his examination of tragedy turns upon its ostensible emotional effect on the audience). Moreover, literature has been instrumental to rhetoric, and vice versa, since the emergence of rhetoric as a field of study: the speeches in Homer served as an early model for Greek scholars, and classical literature remained a centerpiece of rhetorical instruction through the Roman and medieval periods (Kallendorf, xx). For Quintilian (35—ca. 96 CE) (and for Cicero), the study of rhetoric was the pursuit of vir bonus, the “good man,” speaking well, a commitment to civic humanism pursued via science, philosophy, art, and literature. But as the centuries progressed, epistemological critiques began to diminish the importance of rhetoric. Though it had been conceived by Aristotle (and to an even greater extent, the Sophists) as a means to discover or “invent” knowledge, in the sixteenth century Petrus Ramus (1515—72) reopened Plato's ancient criticism of rhetoric—housed in a critical distinction between rhetoric and dialectic—and thereby reasserted rhetoric's status as a degraded form of logic. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment further diminished rhetoric's intellectual status and scholarly role, positing language as—at best—an ineffective tool to transmit scientific fact rather than a means to probe “probable” truths and discover knowledge (see the philosophical works of Francis Bacon and John Locke). Rather than a holistic understanding of ethics, common wisdom, and how to encourage people toward virtuous civic action (a broad educational project that would necessarily include the study of literature), rhetoric became subsidiary: a superfluous study of the eloquence and style that supplemented true knowledge.

In the twentieth century, two things about rhetorical study were clear. First, despite remaining at the heart of formal education in Europe through the eighteenth century, and in the U.S. until the late nineteenth, rhetoric, as a mode of epistemological inquiry, had been substantially downgraded (Bizzell and Herzberg). Within the newly formed departments of English, rhetoric had become reduced primarily to the teaching of grammar and expository writing, with investigation of persuasion and probabilistic knowledge pushed into the social sciences and, eventually, communication studies (R. J. Connors, 1991, “Rhetoric in the Modern University,” in The Politics of Writing Instruction, ed. R.H. Bullock et al.). What remained within English Studies was the study of literature as literature, as a unique form of poetic language aesthetically and intellectually distinct from rhetoric, and deserving of its own particular modes of inquiry (J. A. Berlin, 1996, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures). This method was provided by the New Criticism.

To best understand how the rhetorical study of literature eventually emerged from, and reacted to, the intellectual conditions of the New Criticism (a theoretical school which remained the dominant intellectual strain of literary analysis from the 1930s through the 1960s), it is useful to couch its theories in rhetorical terms. The work of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, though coming in the middle of the New Criticism movement, provides the clearest example. In the “Intentional Fallacy” and the “Affective Fallacy” (1946), Wimsatt and Beardsley advocate excising the author (an entity whose true intentions can never be objectively discovered) and the audience (an entity whose subjective opinions about a work of literature are beneath scholarly consideration) from literary analysis. What remains in this decidedly a-rhetorical mode of inquiry is the text itself, an autonomous unit which can then be read—closely—to determine its forms, structure, nuance, and aesthetic quality (see FORMALISM). Though some New Critics adhered to these a-rhetorical strictures more tightly than others (a case in point is I. A. Richards, whose Practical Criticism, 1929, used readers' responses to seek out the cause of incorrect readings), what New Critical approaches generally presumed was that (1) literature, considered in its own right, was a unique form of language and (2) it should be considered by audiences in a detached and ahistorical manner, two points where the rhetorical approach to literature—defined by attention to a text's actual persuasive effects and the means by which an author created them—push back, most notably in the work of Burke and Booth.

Starting from the position that man is a “symbol-using animal,” Burke's conceptualization of rhetoric as the means by which humans identify with each other not only erodes the distinction between poetic and rhetorical language (a position he argues in Counter Statement, 1931, and The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941), but makes all language use necessarily a form of rhetorical discourse. For Burke, language is symbolic action (just as literature is “equipment for living”), and insofar as our symbol use touches on every facet of our lives—from war, to newspaper advertisements, to “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” to this encyclopedia entry—all of these texts should be opened up to a rhetorical method that can help probe the mysteries of human motivation and mutual understanding. Burke provides such a method in Grammar of Motives (1945), which outlined his analytical program of dramatism, a “pentadic” heuristic for dissecting a rhetorical artifact by (1) always considering rhetorical acts to be “molten,” able to be approached by any number of interpretive angles and by (2) providing five, always refracting and mutually reinforcing, ratios of interpretation (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) and then extrapolating from them the ideological and philosophical consequences of their perspective on human conduct. Burke's notion of ratio was later to be taken up by Harold Bloom in his investigations on the anxiety of influence.

Though seen today as a viable critique of the New Critics (as well as an intellectual and methodological precursor to the poststructuralist rhetorical project), Burke's influence was not as apparent at the time of his writing (Bizzell and Herzberg). Another contemporary rhetorical challenge to the prevailing New Critical orthodoxies was more successful—one launched by the so-called Chicago School, founded by R. S. Crane (influenced by Richard McKeon, including Sheldon Sacks and Ralph Rader). These University of Chicago scholars engaged with Aristotelian techniques to rethink the rhetorical relationships inherent in literary communication. Rather than treat dramatic and poetic texts as sterilized and self-contained objects, the neo-Aristotelian method contemplated the effects (or affects) a work of literature produces and then reasoned back from those effects to determine, and typologize, the “means” (the method of craft or art) that produced them. The Chicago School's version of rhetorical poetics failed to unseat the prevailing orthodoxy of the New Critics. But a member of its second generation, Booth, innovated upon their methods—pushing beyond both poetry and poetics and in a more overt form of rhetorical analysis—substantively redefining both the rhetorical criticism of literature in general, and the novel in particular, for American scholars in the mid-twentieth century.

Conceived as a critique of the “dogmas” of New Criticism—that literature, to achieve its exalted status, should be “objective”; that “realism” (a novelistic instinct to “show” and not “tell”) should be the dominant aesthetic; that the audience should remain impartial in its deliberation upon a work—Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction reinserted rhetorical considerations into fiction in order to consider the efficacy of particular novelistic techniques in achieving particular literary—and ethical—effects. For Booth, literature is not only a communicative act between authors and readers, but one between authors, narrators, and readers, with the tacit understanding that an author is attempting to persuade her audience to assent to a particular set of judgments about the presented fictional world. Booth's expanded model of literary communication allowed him to assess and triangulate the potential consequences of authors' and audiences' “distance” (see SPACE) from narrators and characters (and from one another), leading to a host of still influential heuristics, including his views on narrators as unreliable and reliable; and dramatized and undramatized. The Rhetoric of Fiction also found Booth, in the book's most controversial innovation, advancing the proposition that an author's rhetorical presence, her craft in constructing the text, is never—despite the New Critics' claims—absent. Rather, it always emerges as the “implied author,” the “sum total” of the author's choices (“the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole...to which this implied author is committed”), choices which are made precisely to create—rhetorically—a hypothetical reader “suited to appreciate such a character and the book he is writing” and to persuade the real reader to join in that appreciation (Booth, 89).

The raison d'être of Booth's rhetorical approach was developing criteria from which readers could make their own judgments about the ethics and efficacy of literary works, and from which they could understand the unique, and complex, relationships forged between authors and readers, a project continued in A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) and The Company We Keep (1988). Ironically, however, it was English Studies' eventual embrace of rhetorical study—or, more precisely, its embrace of the epistemologically robust, and arguably radical, theorizations of rhetoric heralded by poststructuralism's “linguistic turn”—that put the rhetorical approach to literature, as exemplified by Booth and the Chicago School, methodologically at odds with the field (see STRUCTURALISM).

Explained in the briefest of terms, the poststructuralist project begins with an echo of the ancient Sophists' understanding of the non-referentiality of language. Language—linguistic signs—is neither a transparent nor a degraded medium of access to a more knowable world; rather, language—rhetoric, the text—is all there is. Two paradigm-shifting implications for the rhetorical study of literature quickly arise. First, as articulated most famously by the mid-career work of Stanley Fish, this anti-foundationalist approach to text is both hyper-rhetorical and unmoored from the typical anchors of rhetorical interpretation: if neither authorial intention nor audience response can be presumed or appealed to in literary analysis (if, following Fish's penchant for quoting Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”), then the validity of any interpretation of text (or even the existence of a particular text) is basically a matter of the “interpretive community” one belongs to—an interpretive community, it must be pointed out, that one always already belongs to by virtue of acquiescing to a particular textual interpretation. Fish's interrogation of theories of intention and reader-response (coinciding with Roland Barthes's arguments against authorial intention and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of authorship) necessarily changed the rules of the rhetorical approach to literature. The second impact of poststructuralism on the rhetorical study of literature, however, was to expand—and, as an intellectual, practical, and disciplinary matter, arguably explode—the very category of literature within English Studies. On this point, Michel Foucault is (ironically) the central organizing figure. Drawing upon the linguistic insights of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900), and rolling back the Enlightenment's epistemological critique of rhetoric, Foucault sought out the complex relationships between rhetoric (in Foucault's parlance: discourse) and the development of particular regimes of knowledge, exploring the discursive constructivism inherent in sexuality, science, psychology (see PSYCHOLOGICAL), power, and prisons, and helping to pave the way for an expansive, epistemic cultural studies approach to rhetoric and literature.

As is the case with any history, we must take care to acknowledge that there is no certain way to determine why trends in literary analysis come and go. That said, in the wake of the poststructuralist turn—with its emphasis on the ideological effects of discourse and its acknowledgment of the politics underpinning any particular interpretive community—the next analytical step would seem to be embracing a method able to trace out the ideological implications of literary discourse (see IDEOLOGY). And by the 1980s, the rediscovery and translation of the works of Bakhtin provided a rhetorical inroad to these queries. In his seminal early twentieth-century works—“Discourse in the Novel” and The Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1963)—Bakhtin moves beyond his Russian Formalist roots to consider more fully how all words and discourse, far from being sterilized and univocal, are “shot through with intentions and accents”: no language is “neutral,” or rather, “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (282). In other words, no word's meaning can ever be fully contained—completely cauterized from its social context—regardless of an author's appropriation and manipulation of it. The best approach to literary works, then, is to approach them dialogically: putting authors and readers into conversation via their mutual (though not necessarily non-competing) engagement—ideological, sociological, political—with language. And for Bakhtin, the best genre from which to consider these multiple, and often competing, social contexts of discourse (“heteroglossia”) is the novel, a genre whereby an author acts as an orchestrator, bringing into conversation the competing discourses of the day—the church, the street, the court of justice, the bar, the home, the factory—via a panoply of narrative forms (hybrid, double-voiced, parodic, skaz, etc.) that do not allow the author to “monologically” overpower his characters.

Bakhtin's identification of particular narrative techniques, and the ways in which they engage readers in considering their aesthetic and ideological judgments of fictional work, brings us to the most prominent contemporary proponents of the rhetorical approach to literature, the “third generation” of Chicago School critics. Represented by the work of Phelan and Rabinowitz (though also including scholars such as Harry Shaw, David Richter, and Dorothy Hale), this continuation of the Chicago School project takes as its starting point the communicative transactions between authors, narrators, and audiences in order to refine rhetorical heuristics that can enable evaluations of them. Working primarily from the perspective of readers, Rabinowitz has both explored the implications of how readers situate themselves among interrelated audience positions—the “flesh-and-blood” audience (the actual audience reading a text); the “authorial” audience (the ideal reader who understands the implied author's communication perfectly); and the “narrative audience” (the role, and assumptions, readers take on within a narrative world)—and investigated the conventions that typically guide readers' interpretations of narratives. Phelan, working from his 1996 redefinition of narrative as a form of rhetoric (“the telling of a story by someone to someone on some occasion for some purpose”) considers the ethical and aesthetic calculations implicated in the multiple layers of rhetorical communication inherent in narrative acts (8). Beginning with Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), which considers how narrative progressions are catalyzed via an audience's responses to textual dynamics, and extending most recently to Experiencing Fiction (2007), which continues the exploration of three interlocking mechanisms for rhetorical judgment of fictional texts (the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic levels), Phelan's concern—whether dealing with character narration, authorial technique, or reader judgments—is the interrogation of narrative as a rhetorical activity with ideological, ethical, and affective implications.

This synopsis of current research into rhetorical literary criticism returns us to our original question: what is the status of the rhetorical study of literature in our present context? It has been nearly thirty years since Terry Eagleton, speaking on the state of literary theory (and attempting to clear the air of postmodern sensibilities and the treatment of literature as a “privileged object” “separate from the social”), lobbied for a return to the “oldest form of literary criticism in the world,” rhetoric, the study of the effects of discourse and how to produce them in particular audiences. Now, in the early twenty-first century, English Studies has begun to see the return, and mainstreaming, of both ethical and aesthetic concerns, and their treatment—whether explicitly or implicitly—in rhetorical ways (see Berube and Hale, respectively) as well as a turn away from the poststructuralist “dogmas” against agency and intentionalism (see COGNITIVE). Put into rhetorical terms, the question then remains: in such an intellectual climate, and in an economic moment where the material conditions of the modern university have made Rhetoric and Composition Studies an increasingly powerful pedagogical and political influence within English departments (M. Bousquet, 2008, How the University Works), are we in another moment of rhetorical resurgence? Or merely another brief footnote in the 2,500-year-old relationship between rhetoric and literature?

Figurative Language and the Novel

If the first part of this entry approaches the matter of rhetoric in terms of its broad conceptual and institutional history, it is also important to address figurative language, which is a fundamental element in the art of rhetoric and also plays an important role in the language of the novel.

Figurative language generally refers to any language that departs from ordinary usage or diction, although rhetoricians have noted that it frequently appears in everyday speech. Tropes such as metaphor (“a device for seeing something in terms of something else,” as Burke defines it in his 1945 Grammar of Motives), litotes (a form of understatement in which one states something by negating its opposite: “not bad,” “not unattractive,” etc.) or hyperbole (exaggeration, “the lecture went on forever”) affect the meaning of words, while figures (or schemes) such as anaphora (the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a series of clauses, used for force and emphasis), hyperbaton (change in syntax or word order), or aposiopesis (breaking or trailing off so as to call attention to what is left unsaid) affect their placing or repetition.

In Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1989) Brian Vickers notes that recent scholarship privileges tropes, especially metaphor, a complaint reiterated elsewhere by scholars such as Gérard Genette and Jeanne Fahnestock. Indeed, the deconstructionist critic Jonathan Culler has referred to metaphor as the “figure of figures, a figure for figurality” (1983, The Pursuit of Signs, 189), while Hayden White has called it the master of the four so-called master tropes singled out by Burke (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony; 1973, Metahistory, 33). Many figures, by contrast, have been dismissed as technical curiosities, antiques better left to molder in dusty handbooks of rhetoric, yet Vickers and others argue that they have received short shrift: figures are vehicles for emotion. To give but two examples: a change in syntax can signify powerful feeling—a fragmented sentence, for example, could communicate the strain or stress of emotional disturbance, while by leaving the essential unsaid, aposiopesis may express grief or suspicion more powerfully than any explicit statement.

Classical Hellenic and Roman rhetoric divides style into four chief components: correctness, clarity, appropriateness, and ornamentation. It also accords great importance to the figures of speech. In his 1593 treatise The Garden of Eloquence, regarded as one of the greatest books in English on the subject, Henry Peacham defines figurative language as forms of speech that lend grace and strength to language, enabling orators to sway their listeners.

What role does figurative language play in literature, and more specifically in the novel? As noted above, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth argues that authors intervene in their narratives to provide the reader with information about the otherwise inaccessible inner lives of their characters. Since Gustave Flaubert, who recommended that the author disappear behind his work, one of the guiding principles of modern fiction has been “show, don't tell.” The novelist is supposed to become a deus absconditus who is absent from his creation: no authorial intrusions allowed. Booth counters that even deliberately self-effacing narrators continue to fulfill their age-old role of rhetorical persuaders, manipulating us into siding with this character or that one, coming at the fictional material from a particular angle, even skewing or distorting the facts, as is the case with the notorious “unreliable narrator.” According to Booth, authors of fiction cannot shrug off their role of rhetors so easily.

It remains to determine the role of figurative language in this enterprise of rhetorical persuasion. One answer is that devices such as metaphor increase the reader's sense that the fictional world exists palpably and concretely. In his study, Proust's Binoculars (1963), an exploration of the author's optical imagery, Roger Shattuck writes that Marcel Proust provides us with “an image combined out of many images,” and suggests that his prodigious layering of metaphors contributes to our sensation that the author has actually succeeded in re-creating the world (107). Booth's work suggests another possibility: tropes offer a glimpse into the recesses of characters' minds. One of the most famous figures in Proust is the extended metaphor of the water gods in Le Côté de Guermantes (1920—21, The Guermantes Way), in which the prestigious aristocrats ensconced at the theater in their boxes (in French baignoires, or “bathtubs,” hence the aqueous imagery) appear to look down upon the groundlings in the orchestra like divinities in a watery realm. Here the metaphor becomes an expression of the protagonist's anguished desire for inclusion in elite aristocratic society.

In The Art of the Novel (1988), Milan Kundera offers a contrast between metaphors from Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) (“Already his prayer drops its leaves and juts out of his mouth like a dead shrub”) and Hermann Broch's Die Schlafwandler (1932, The Sleepwalkers) (“He wanted unambiguous clarity: he wanted to create a world of such clear simplicity that his solitude might be bound to that clarity as to an iron post”; Kundera, 140). He argues that the former serves primarily an ornamental function while the latter reveals the character's existential attitude and furthers the phenomenological vocation of the novelistic genre. While novelists often employ the same rhetorical devices as orators or lyrical bards (or, for that matter, as advertising copywriters), the constraints and traditional parameters of the novel lead them to orient those devices toward ends germane to the genre. In How Fiction Works (2008), James Wood argues that the use of metaphor in a narrative fiction sums up the essence of imaginative writing. Every metaphor or simile is “a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story” (202). For Wood, the leap toward the counterintuitive is the secret of powerful metaphor. Figurative language that defamiliarizes packs the greatest punch, though straining for flashy effects does little but draw unnecessary attention to the author's rhetorical gymnastics.

Some figures of speech (or patterns thereof) bring to mind the usages of a particular author. Aposiopesis, or “breaking off” (often typographically rendered with a dash), is a trope favored by Laurence Sterne, who uses it to particularly effective comic purpose at the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey (1768):

—But the Fille de Chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me—So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre's—(“The Case of Delicacy”)

Translation can also highlight how specific rhetorical strategies underpin an author's style. The translator runs the risk of either hewing too closely to the syntactic structure of the original or attempting to iron out its idiosyncrasies. The critic André Aciman has pointed out that recent attempts to improve upon existing translations of Proust have fallen into the latter trap. He notes one such error in the translation of the opening sentence of the second volume of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913—27, Remembrance of Things Past), which employs anacoluthon, an abrupt change of syntax within a sentence, in order to wind its way sinuously to a sharp, unexpected comic conclusion. In trying to smooth out the difficulties of Proustian prose, the translator avoids grammatical solecisms but transforms Proust's distinctive style and hijacks his underlying literary intentions. Aciman's gripe with Proust's translators highlights our tendency to fall into predictable linguistic and rhetorical ruts. Paradoxically, as Richard Lanham has observed, clichés, which he characterizes as “petrified metaphors,” stem from discontent with plain, everyday utterance. Lanham argues that we invent tautological and periphrastic ways of saying what could be said more plainly simply as a means of relieving tedium. But the sum total of these whimsical individual efforts turns out to be more tedious still. Echoing age-old ideas about art's role in renewing language, Lanham suggests that we need literature to shake us out of our bad habits by doing things with words that are truly fresh and creative.

Bibliography

1. Aciman, A. (2005), “Proust's Way?” New York Review of Books, 1 Dec.

2. Bakhtin, M. (1981), “Discourse in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist.

3. Barthes, R. (1977), “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath.

4. Berube, M. (2005), “Engaging the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. M. Berube.

5. Bizzell, P. and B. Herzberg (1991), Rhetorical Tradition.

6. Booth, W. (1983), Rhetoric of Fiction.

7. Burke, K. (1969), Rhetoric of Motives.

8. Eagleton, T. (1983), Literary Theory.

9. Fahnestock, J. (2002), Rhetorical Figures in Science.

10. Fish, S. (1989), “Rhetoric,” in Doing What Comes Naturally.

11. Genette, G. (1982), “Rhetoric Restrained,” in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. A. Sheridan.

12. Hale, D. (2009), “ Aesthetics and the New Ethics,” PMLA 124(3): 896—905.

13. Kallendorf, C., ed. (1999), Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature.

14. Lanham, R.A. (1974), Style.

15. Mailloux, S. (2001), “Interpretation and Rhetorical Hermenuetics,” in Reception Study.

16. Phelan, J. (1996), Narrative as Rhetoric.

17. Rabinowitz, P. (1977), “ Truth in Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 4: 121—41.

18. Rabinowitz, P. (1987), Before Reading.

19. Shaw, H. (1983), Forms of Historical Fiction.

20. Wimsatt, W.K. and M.C. Beardsley (1946), “ The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54: 468—88.