1961年,布思在专著《小说修辞学》中首次提出了隐含作者的概念。这一理论在当时日渐衰微的重视研究作家生平和社会历史语境研究的“外在”批评与正在蓬勃发展的以法国结构主义文学批评为代表的关注文本自身的“内在”批评这两种截然不同的文学批评方法之间成功地建立起一个缓冲地带,因而迅速被批评界接受和采纳,《小说修辞学》一书更被称作“小说美学的里程碑”。(程锡麟,2001:21) In 1961, Booth first proposed the concept of implied author in the novel Rhetoric of Fiction. At the time, this theory gradually declined to the “” external “criticism of the study of the writer ’s life and the study of the social history and context and the criticism of the vigorous” intrinsic “criticism of the vigorous text represented by the French structuralist literary criticism The successful establishment of a buffer zone between these two distinct approaches to literary criticism has quickly been accepted and adopted by critics. The book ”The Rhetoric of Novels“ is more commonly referred to as the ”milestone of novel aesthetics." (Cheng Xilin, 2001: 21)