Tone

Reviews / Votes

Through close readings of a great variety of recent literary texts approached from the innovative angle of 'tone,' this book sheds new light on the inseparable processes of reading and narrating. Its brilliant analyses of tone, while further exploring the interactions of rhetoric and politics, allow to thoroughly revisit literary genres and categories as well as the definitions of some of the basic terms of criticism. * Anne-Laure Tissut, Professor of American Literature, Rouen University, France * In scrutinizing and dramatizing the inner workings of tone via the insights of narrative theory, Judith Roof's splendid book takes us where few have traveled before. Tone demonstrates--with vim, vigor, playfulness, and humor--how one might become a better reader, audiator, and imaginary listener of complex texts, whether comic, tragic, gloomy, sanctimonious, confessional, propagandistic, ironic, parodic, or satirical. * Devoney Looser, Foundation Professor of English, Arizona State University, USA * Judith Roof's utterly original monograph promise to turn 'tone' and 'audiation,' the procedures of close reading through which tone can be discerningly 'heard,' into indispensable terms of literary analysis-and powerful obstacles to the protocols of surface reading. * Donald E. Pease, Ted & Helen Geisel Professor of the Humanities, Dartmouth College, USA *