Includes bibliography Artistic purity and the rhetoric of fiction. Telling and showing ; 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 author's voice in fiction. The uses of reliable commentary ; Telling as showing: dramatized narrators, reliable and unreliable ; Reliable narrators as dramatized spokesmen for the implied author ; 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