The Most Useful Books About Point of View

Further Reading

I’m not even calling it a Bibliography.

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, The University of Chicago Press, 1961, second ed. 1983. For those wanting to go deeply into all points of view, this is the standard work. Chunky, sometimes clunky, but very readable if you’re fascinated.

Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh University Press, 2007. A theoretical approach.

Graham Emory Guest, ‘Grass, Winter Park & Consciousness in Fiction’, Department of Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, Feb 2012. For those wanting to go deeply into First Person Present Tense narration.

Brian Gingrich, The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Oxford University Press, 2021. I reviewed this here.

Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Henry James’s Prefaces to the New York Edition of his work are where a lot of this concern and sophistication starts, although James was learning from and disagreeing with Flaubert, Saint-Beuve and others. In 1934, the Prefaces were collected as The Art of the Novel, and there are some beautifully plain editions around-second hand. The one from Scribners in 1947 is, of all the books I own, my favourite physical object. Recently there was an expensive scholarly edition from Cambridge University Press, edited by Oliver Herford.

David Jauss, Alone with All that Can Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction, 2008. Especially the chapter ‘From Long Shots to X Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction’.

David Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft, 2011.

Andrew McDonnell, ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You: A Creative Inquiry into Disruptive Second-Person Narratives’, PhD, Anglia Ruskin University, 2022.

James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny (eds.), Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories: Revised Edition (1995).

James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Cornell University Press, 2004.

James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Ohio State University Press, 2007.

James Phelan, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative, Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Ohio State University Press, 2006. For a more up-to-date take than Wayne C. Booth.

Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Sandrine Sorlin, The Stylistics of ‘You’: Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Anthologies

Kevin Jillian and Dodie Bellamy (eds.), Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, Nightboat Books, 2017.

Gail Scott, Robert Gluck, and Camille Roy (eds.), Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, Coach House Books, 2005.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my readers on Substack for their corrections, suggestions, jokes, and encouragement.

Thanks to Thomas Morris for suggesting the First Person Plural Present Tense and First Person Future Tense examples.

Thanks to Alice Jolly, Professor Richard Canning, Tom Ue and Jenn Ashworth for further reading suggestions.

Most of all, thanks to my students at The University of Westminster, Birkbeck College, The University of Southampton, Arvon, the London Library and elsewhere.

This is the end of the Complete Guide to Point of View.

If you think anything’s missing, let me know -

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