Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Rhetoric is the author's term for the means by which the writer makes known his vision to the reader and persuades him of its validity; and he demonstrates convincingly that there is no essential difference between ostentatiously rhetorical novelists like Fielding and Dickens, and the admired masters of impersonality--Flaubert, James, Joyce ... this is a major critical work which should be required reading for everyone concerned in the academic study of prose fiction."

Artistic purity and the rhetoric of fiction -- General rules, I: "True novels must be realistic" -- General rules, II: "All authors should be objective" -- General rules, III: "True art ignores the audience" -- General rules, IV: Emotions, beliefs, and the reader's objectivity -- Types of narration -- The authors's voice in fiction -- The uses of reliable commentary -- Telling as showing: dramatized narrators, reliable and unreliable -- Control of distance in Jane Austen's Emma -- Impersonal narration -- The uses of authorial silence -- The price of impersonal narration, I: Confusion of distance --
The price of impersonal narration, II: Henry James and the unreliable narrator -- The morality of impersonal narration.