Bloomsbury Academic Tone: Writing and the Sound of Feeling

Tone is often decisive in whether we love or hate a writer. Yet literary critics rarely treat tone as a necessary or important element of literary style or critique. There are surprisingly few analyses of what tone is, how texts produce tone, or the ways tone, as an essential element of narration, contributes to character, story, mood, and voice. Tones 24 micro chapters offers students a playful, eclectic, and fast-paced guide into the creation of tone in a variety of modern and contemporary works of literature by writers such as varied as Hemingway, Woolf, and Sedaris, as well as in criticism, advertising, and machine-authored texts. Judith Roof shows how tone is a crucial element in all writing, as it produces the illusion of a telling voice; creates a sense of character, personality and attitude; inflects events recounted; anticipates certain directions and possibilities; and creates an ambiance that simultaneously produces, enables, and shapes narratives and characters. Tone gives us a lively and original way to rethink the practice of literary criticism.