Kenneth Burke

"In this admirable and important book Robert Wess takes up the project of understanding Burke in the context of contemporary critical theory. Wess's approach to Burke's writings is both intelligent and thorough, attuned to the texts' largest dimensions and their subtlest workings alike. His particular interest in Burke's rhetoric of the subject and in the essentialism-constructionism dialectic provides a useful and mostly undistorting focus for the study of a large body of work. More important, it provides an excellent way to understand the relation of Burke's thought and method to critical theory at the end of the century." Southern Humanities Review