Towards a Rhetoric of Fictionality in the Nonfiction Novel: A Study of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

Abstract

Although Capote’s notorious incorporation of purely fictionalized scenes in his seminal nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, subtitled A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, (1965) has long been exposed and well documented, the substantial body of criticism produced on this issue is still haunted by what amount to a sort of illegitimacy fallacy.