Fictional Worlds
Harvard University Press. 1986
Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.
Characters in Fictional Worlds
Walter de Gruyter. 2020










Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys todays diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the...
The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Barkuis Pub. 2013










This innovative collection explores the vital role played by fictional narratives in Christian and Jewish self-fashioning in the early Roman imperial period. Employing a diversity of approaches, including cultural studies, feminist, philological, and narratological, expert scholars from six countries offer twelve essays on Christian fictions or fictionalized texts and one essay on Aseneth. All the papers were originally presented at the Fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel in...
Cops and Constables
Popular Press. 1986










In both British and American detective fiction the police detective has emerged as a fictional protagonist. However, the American policemen have not achieved the prominence of their British counterparts. The thirteen essays in this volume indicate some of the principle elements which appear again and again in both British and American police procedurals.
Fictional Minds
U of Nebraska Press. 2020










"Readers create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an "embedded narrative" within the whole narrative of the novel. The combination of these embedded narratives forms the plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also highlights the social public and dialogic mind and the "mind beyond the skin." For example...
Defoe and Fictional Time
University of Georgia Press. 2010










Defoe and Fictional Time shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers and their audience, and above all the questions of how fiction shapes the phenomenal time of reading. Paul K. Alkon offers first a study of time in Defoe's fiction, with glances at Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; and second a theoretical discussion of time in fiction. Arguing that...
Greek Fictional Letters
OUP Oxford. 2002










The book explores a relatively unfamiliar and under-appreciated area of Greek literature, imaginary letters written between about 100 BC and 500 AD. They are imaginary or fictional either because both writer and recipient are invented, or because they are attributed to real historical characters. In the latter group, the real authors are unknown, whereas we know at least the names of those in the first group. Letter writing, real and fictional, was an important activity in this period, which...
Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-modernist American Novel
Bucknell University Press. 1985










"Fictional space" is the imaginal expanse of field created by fictional discourse; a space which, through ultimately self-referential and self-validating, necessarily exists in ascertainable relation to the real world outside the text. After defining his theoretical framework the author applies it to American fiction of the twentieth century.