Acknowledging that fiction usually bears some kind of relation to reality - for example, the London of Dickens, this text offers a theory of literary fiction based on the idea of possible worlds. Beginning with a discussion of the extant semantics and pragmatics of fictionality - by Leibniz, Russell, Frege, Searle, Auerbach and others - it relates them to literature, literary theory and narratology. The text also investigates theories of action, intention and literary communication to develop a system of concepts that ...
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Acknowledging that fiction usually bears some kind of relation to reality - for example, the London of Dickens, this text offers a theory of literary fiction based on the idea of possible worlds. Beginning with a discussion of the extant semantics and pragmatics of fictionality - by Leibniz, Russell, Frege, Searle, Auerbach and others - it relates them to literature, literary theory and narratology. The text also investigates theories of action, intention and literary communication to develop a system of concepts that allows an reinterpretation of a host of classical, modern and postmodern fictional narratives - from Defoe through Dickens, Dostoevsky, Huysmans, Bely and Kafka to Hemingway, Kundera, Rhys, Plenzdorf and Coetzee.
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