Tone is often decisive in whether we love or dislike a story, novel, or even critical essay. 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.

Tone's 24 micro-chapters offer a playful, eclectic, and fast-paced guide into the creation of tone in a variety of modern and contemporary works of literature by such varied writers 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.

Judith Roof is the William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA. She is the author of The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2018), What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016), as well as five other monographs, six edited (or co-edited) books, and more than 80 essays on topics ranging from modern drama to The Big Lebowski, Ethel Merman, Posthumanism, the novels of Percival Everett, the work of Rabelais, Beckett, Pinter, Duras, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, film studies, genetics, critical legal studies, and secondary characters.