Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited

“Fictionality and Literature provides a clear window into one of the most interesting and provocative new approaches to narrative––the rhetoric of fictionality. Enhanced by a diversity of theoretical approaches, this collection will have a broad and profound impact on narrative research.” —Brian McHale, author of The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems

Taking its cues from Richard Walsh’s influential 2007 book, The Rhetoric of Fictionality, Fictionality and Literature sets out to examine the implications of a rhetorical understanding of fictionality. A rhetorical approach understands fictionality and nonfictionality not as binary opposites but as different means to the same end: influencing an audience’s understanding of the world. Arguing that fiction is not just a feature of particular works, such as novels, but an adaptable instrument used to achieve an author’s specific rhetorical goals, the contributors theorize how to reconceive of core literary concepts and influences such as author, narrator, plot, character, consciousness, metaphor, metafiction/metalepsis, intertextuality, paratext, ethics, and social justice. Combining analyses of a wide range of texts by Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others with historical events such as the Nat Tate biography hoax and the Anders Breivik murders, contributors discuss not only a rhetorical definition of fictionality but also the wider consequences of such a conception. In addition, some chapters within Fictionality and Literature offer alternatives to a rhetorical paradigm, thus expanding the volume’s representation of the current state of the conversation about fictionality in literature.

Contributors:

H. Porter Abbott, Catherine Gallagher, Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, Rikke Andersen Kraglund, Susan S. Lanser, Jakob Lothe, Maria Mäkelä, Greta Olson, Sylvie Patron, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Wendy Veronica Xin, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen