Fictional Worlds

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. 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.

Thomas Pavelis a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavelargues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes its through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. 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.

Thomas Pavelis a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavelargues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes its through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

Library Journal

Moving beyond the structuralist focus on narrativity as a model for literature, this book undertakes a global theory of fictionality at the level of cultural anthropology. It draws on philosophical possible worlds theory together with a variety of formalist approaches to literature and mythology. But it is far more than a survey. Pavel mounts a series of arguments that take full account of the ``deep heterogeneity of texts'' and at the same time seeks to locate fiction in relation to basic cognitive and imaginative functions. The argument moves from specific logical and linguistic considerations to general speculations on religion, culture, and aesthetics. Readers will find much to argue with, but they cannot help but be stimulated by Pavel's wide-ranging and original undertaking. Alexander Gelley, English & Comparative Literature Dept., Univ. of California, Irvine

Thomas G. Pavel is Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz.