In the past The Rhetoric of Fiction has been properly enough read mostly as a work about prose fiction, but the book's importance is such as to warrant an attempt at "placing" it according to its general critical and theoretical orientation. Although this procedure may seem to risk forcing Booth into a Neo-Aristotelian bed of Procrustes, it will actually turn out to provide a way of assessing his originality and independence. The late R. S. Crane has referred to The Rhetoric of Fiction as offering "a fuller development and more specific applications of the general approach to critical problems outlined" in his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, but Booth has in fact achieved a broadening of Neo-Aristotelian theory that amounts to wholesale revision. Nevertheless, The Rhetoric of Fiction opens with the particular distinction among literary "kinds" most fundamental to the Neo-Aristotelians. The very first...