The chapter appraises David Lewis’s seminal work on truth in fiction. This will allow us to make an important distinction between three uses of fictive discourse, including the one that Lewis’s work focuses on: discourse characterizing the content of fictions. The chapter examines variations of standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 “Postscript A,” his proposals on the topic are – as Hanley puts it – as good as it gets. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist these objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen, and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests, and which the chapter recommends, draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time, that of Walton, which is to be examined in Chapter 3.

Imaginings play a crucial role in accounting for fictionality, but what are they? Focusing on those invited by fictions, this chapter argues for the deflationary view that imaginings are just entertainings, I=E. This view was standard in early analytic philosophy, but few current writers appear to hold it. The chapter critically addresses an argument by Walton against I=E that may contribute to explaining this turn; some who espouse views that are otherwise close to I=E endorse this argument against it. In response to Walton’s argument, the chapter invokes a point suggested by Walton himself: Many imaginings – i.e., entertainings, on the view defended here – are mental episodes that agents launch for a purpose. The chapter also appeals to this fact to dispose of a miscellany of other contemporary considerations against I=E. In addition to answering objections, the chapter offers a positive consideration in favor of I=E: to wit, that it may help to establish the imagination as a fundamental, irreducible mental attitude – a view that many philosophers do endorse.

Fictional discourse is, primarily, discourse that is used to produce literary fictions; but there is also the ‘metafictional’ discourse used to talk about fictions, i.e., to report their contents or other features. On a traditional view articulated by Searle, primary fictional discourse doesn’t have any specific semantics; sentences there just have the semantics that they would have in their standard uses. Fiction-makers convey their fictions by pretending to use sentences in their standard ways without doing so, and without giving them a specific, dedicated representational point with a semantics of its own. This Mere Pretense view is less popular nowadays than it used to be. A question the now more popular alternative Dedicated Representation view raises is: What is the contribution of intuitively empty names to such a dedicated semantics? Many supporters of the traditional Mere Pretense view, including Searle, argue that, in the metafictional uses to which they grant a semantics, apparently empty names are not in fact empty; rather, they each refer to some more or less exotic entity. Some of those who grant a dedicated semantics to primary fictional discourse, like Salmon and others, extend this realist view to it. This chapter aims to uphold considerations that have already been raised by irrealists against these proposals, by highlighting their counterintuitive features and explaining in our theoretical setting why they are bad.

Some fictions have explicit narrators, like Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu, Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or the unnamed first-person teller in Don Quixote. Explicit narrators are less common in fiction films, but there are some – the late Joe Gillis in Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, and Addison DeWitt in Mankiewicz’s 1952 film All About Eve. This chapter addresses the debate on whether there are covert fictional narrators in most or all fictions, which is assumed, for instance, in David Lewis’s account of truth in fiction. The chapter argues that many fictions, in literature, theater, and film, do have covert narrators, although they may well “fade into the background and have little or no significance for criticism or appreciation,” as Kendall Walton put it. Nevertheless, like Walton (and George Wilson), I reject their ubiquity. To that effect, the chapter relies on the constitutive-rules speech-act account of fictionality that was defended in Chapters 2 and 3 to elaborate on two distinctions suggested by Wilson, and to defend on that basis effaced fictional narrators, by developing his ‘silly question’ reply to skeptics’ arguments against covert narrators.

The recreative view of the imagination sees it as a ‘mirror’ of basic mental attitudes: There are imaginative (pretend) variants of beliefs, i-beliefs (ordinarily called imaginings), i-seeings (visualizings), i-desires, i-emotions … the imagination is ‘half of psychic life’, as Meinong put it. The single attitude rival view sees the imagination instead as a sui generis nonderivative mental attitude, with distinctive traits: distinctive functional roles, distinctive norms to which it is beholden, and a distinctive phenomenology. This chapter confronts a recent argument by analogy for i-desires, due to Greg Currie, which is based on an alleged parallel between beliefs and desires. The chapter argues in response that this argument fails because the parallel on which it relies fails to obtain on different influential accounts of desires. The discussion strengthens responses to earlier arguments for i-desires.

This chapter argues that not only the author but also the implied audiences and situations of the Johannine texts are fictionalized. It also critiques the longstanding scholarly reconstruction of a “Johannine Community,” proposing alternative ways of contextualizing these works.

We have seen how imagination can plausibly be taken to be part of a perceptual referential apparatus. Sensory imaginations therefore contribute to the fulfillment of an empirical intuition’s cognitive roles. The aim of the analysis in this chapter is three-fold: (1) to throw more light upon what is added by imagination to empirical cognition of objects, in the form of perceptual memories and quasi-perceptual anticipations – this is lower order objectification that goes beyond mere perceptual objectification in its own right but which may also be part of higher order objectification through concepts; (2) to show how imagination that mixes with perceptions may also lead to false perceptual judgments – misperception is a topic of this chapter, whereas hallucination is discussed in Chapter 9; (3) to bring out the lack of reality-character of fictional imaginations, even when these imitate perceptions, so as to throw more light upon the nature of perceptions.

This chapter focuses on the diverse manifestations of the feminist movement in Africa and its impact on African literature. It further examines how African women’s writing has contributed to African feminist theorizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Borrowing Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s idea of reading African women’s writing as “theorized fiction” or “fictionalized theory,” the chapter considers, among other issues, how twentieth and twenty-first-century African women’s writing has grappled with questions of gender and how gender is variously conferred and defined; questions of motherhood and how it is configured and contested; and questions of sexuality and the female body. The chapter also pays close attention to the epistemic shifts and various decolonial trajectories that obtain in African feminist thinking and how these are enunciated in African literature.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

Origen’s examination of Jesus’s baptism in Against Celsus offers readers a particularly secure first footing for apprehending his sense of the Gospel narratives’ “mixed” character. That Jesus was baptized by John is hardly problematic, historically speaking. But the events narrated to have taken place directly after the baptism presented no less difficulty for readers in antiquity than they do for readers today. Origen preserves Celsus’s dismissal of the descent of the dove and voice from heaven as an obvious fiction. Origen, however, resists the judgment. Why? His reply to Celsus puts the whole complex of first principles detailed in Part I to work. According to Origen’s view, one can receive the narrative to be “true” inasmuch as it depicts, in figurative language drawn from prophetic literary tropes, Jesus’s own interior inspiration at the commencement of his public ministry. In short, the story narrates something real, something “historical” even, precisely insofar as it is entirely spiritual. The Evangelists then came to share in the same kind of vision Jesus is said to have had at his baptism and narrated “in figures” what they, too, had “perceived in their own understanding.”

This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

This chapter examines attitudes to ancient relief sculpture through a comparison with painting. Focusing on the art of Rome, and especially on the representation of relief sculpture in Roman mural painting of the first centuries BCE and CE, the chapter looks to how ancient painting and relief fed off and reverberated around each other, to the ways in which they both overlapped and, ultimately, sought to distinguish themselves. Drawing on modern media theory, the chapter proposes that Roman relief and painting remediated one another through a double, oscillating logic of immediacy and hypermediacy – through the iterative alternation from communicative transparency to opacity and back. Thinking through relief and painting as reciprocally related media reveals the consistent blurring of boundaries between apparent opposites: two and three dimensions, real and pictorial space, haptic and optic, form and color, and illusion and fiction. The chapter further argues that the representation of relief sculpture within Roman murals permitted painters to explore the boundaries of their capabilities by offering both a material limit to pictorialization and providing ways in which the pictorial could seek to outflank the material.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.