James Phelan is a professor of English and chair of the English department at the Ohio State University. He is editor of the award-winning journal Narrative, and has written and edited several books on literary theory, including Worlds from Words (1981), Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), and Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), and has published a memoir of teaching literature in the academy, Beyond the Tenure Track (1991). With Gerald Graff, he is coeditor of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (1995).