WAYNE BOOTH once complained to his contemporary, the great polymath Hugh Kenner, about students who did not catch the irony in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) — the central instance of ironical prose in the English language. It is not ironic — as Booth himself would have counselled — but rather unlucky, or perhaps unforeseen, that those students should have registered their misreading with the man whose book, A Rhetoric of Irony (1974), remains the most indispensable study of the term to date.

Booth was for nearly half a century one of America’s most influential and well-regarded literary critics. As a rhetorician based at the University of Chicago — an institution with a reputation for encouraging interaction among its departments — Booth and his work traverses an impressive range of disciplines including linguistics, psychology, speech and ethics. However, literary theory, and in particular the study of narrative, is the field to which he made his most significant contributions.

In the early 1950s, university English departments were still in the clutches of New Criticism, a critical doctrine concerned above all with the autonomy of the text itself. In essence, New Critics were as uninterested in the historical context of a literary work as they were with its writer’s intentions (known as the “intentional fallacy”). Though he was influenced to some extent by New Criticism, Booth’s award-winning first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), moves beyond this view.

Through a close reading of a selection of great novelists, Booth investigated the tricky relationship between a novel’s author and narrator. In that book he coined the phrase “unreliable narrator”, a familiar one to students of English. He showed how, through the use of rhetorical techniques, novels manipulate their readers in order to invite particular kinds of responses. It was an antidote to both to the pseudoscience of New Criticism, and the popular idea that a book simply means what its reader thinks it does.

Scholarly books on the subject of rhetoric and fiction do not, as a matter of course, gain wide readerships. But Booth’s groundbreaking study was translated into several languages, from Arabic to Chinese, and became a staple of literature classes the world over.

It was followed by the seminal work on irony, and (among others) Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974); The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction (1988); and For the Love of it: Amateuring and its Rivals (1999). The ideas that inform his earlier books are elaborated on in the later ones, and broadly speaking, Booth’s thinking plots a discernible trajectory.

That Booth turned to what he called “ethical criticism” did not surprise those who knew him. He had been born into an observant Mormon family in American Fork, Utah, and despite a lifelong ambivalence towards religion, he understood and valued its moral imperatives. He was repelled by its dogma but attracted to the idea of a god that embodied rationality.

He excelled as a student and attended Brigham Young University in Provo. In fulfilment of his Mormon duty, he worked as a missionary in Pennsylvania, though his daughter, Alison Booth, said that by this time he was already struggling with his faith. He later married Phyllis Barnes, with whom he had two daughters and a son. From 1944 to 1946 he served in the Army, then took his MA and PhD at the University of Chicago, where he worked with the Neo-Aristotelian scholar, R. S. Crane.

A teaching career beckoned, first at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, then at Earlham College in Indiana, where he was made professor. In 1962, his first Guggenheim fellowship and major publication already under his belt, he took up the George. M. Pullman Chair in English at Chicago. Back at his alma mater, he served as dean, and between 1972 and 1975 was chairman of the Committee on Ideas and Methods. He also co-founded Critical Inquiry, still the most important journal of critical ideas in the United States, and was president of the Modern Language Association of America.

Like Cambridge, Kenyon College, Yale or Johns Hopkins, Chicago was, for a time, the bellwether of an influential school of literary criticism. Booth and his colleagues performed readings of literature that were more self-evidently humanistic, and, as they were disciples of Aristotle, focused on plot and character. Booth, as well as people like E. D. Hirsch and James Phelan, championed a method of scholarship that they felt was somehow more morally centred than that promulgated elsewhere.

Usually opaque to the general reader, literary theory has never had much pull beyond academe. Booth, however, saw that his ideas had practical implications, and could lead towards a greater ethical understanding of life itself: “Read as you would have others read you; listen as you would have others listen,” he wrote in The Company We Keep.

As a narrative scholar, he knew that human conversation mainly consists of telling stories and of passing judgment on them. His work, which gained currency among English intellectuals, enabled people to see through the mechanisms of storytelling and equip them with the skills required to make informed critical, and, as he saw it, ethical judgments.

In 1999, seven years after his retirement from Chicago, Booth published his wellreceived book on amateurism, based on his own attempts to learn the cello at 31. In keeping with his intellectual hallmark, it spoke of the ethical aspects of learning how to do something for its own sake, pointing out that the word amateur is derived from the Latin amare, meaning “to love”. He had also written a memoir, My Many Selves, which is due to be published next year.

He is survived by his wife Phyllis and by two daughters. His son died in a traffic accident in 1969.

Professor Wayne Booth, scholar and critic, was born on February 22, 1921. He died on October 10, 2005, aged 84.