The Complete Guide to POV

Further Reading

I went out to ask, a while ago, and these were the suggestions for the best writing about Point of View.

I’m not even calling it a Bibliography yet.

As you’ll see, I’ve left it deliberately scrappy in the hopes that, together, we’ll be able to add. After which, I’ll gather all together, alphabetise, and perhaps get round to doing some reading and learning.

I’ll start —

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

More recently, here are some suggestions.

Tom Ue on Facebook:

Look at James Phelan’s Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration [Cornell University Press, 2004] and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative [Ohio State University Press, 2007]. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative [also by James Phelan, Ohio State University Press, 2017] is a good read. I’m teaching a course on stylistics in prose fiction atm.

And Alice Jolly suggested:

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Brian Richardson, 2006, Ohio State University Press.

Professor Richard Canning said —

Nobody got it clearer than [Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction] (... though Wolfgang Iser in 3 books has finessed the terrain.)

These include, I guess —

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.

But on top of those, we need only these: Gail Scott, Robert Gluck, and Camille Roy (eds.), Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative [Coach House Books, 2005].

and the practice as opposed to the theory: Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997 edited by the late great Kevin Jillian and Dodie Bellamy [Nightboat Books, 2017]. New narrative! Only just begun! Huzzah!

Jenn Ashworth’s two were —

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

and also

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

I would also add (though slightly away from strict POV) —

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

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

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

For those wanting to go deeply into first person present tense narration, there is a PhD by Graham Emory Guest, ‘Grass, Winter Park & Consciousness in Fiction’, Department of Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, Feb 2012.

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

(You’ll have to track these down via academic routes. If you really need Andrew’s, I can put you in touch with him.)

Finally —

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. This year there was an expensive scholarly edition from Cambridge University Press, edited by Oliver Herford. 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.

But we need your suggestions to complete things.