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 features 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
 

Lasse R. Gammelgaard is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University.

Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University.

Louise Brix Jacobsen is Associate Professor in Danish Media Studies at Aalborg University.

James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University and author of numerous books, including (with Matthew Clark) Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative and Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx.

Richard Walsh is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, and author of The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction.

Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen is Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University.

Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University.

Introduction

Chapter 1        Author

Chapter 2        Narrator

Chapter 3        Plot

Chapter 4        Character

Chapter 5        Consciousness

Chapter 6        Metaphor

Chapter 7        Paratext

Chapter 8        Intertextuality

Chapter 9        Metafiction and Metalepsis

Chapter 10      The Novel

Chapter 11      Poetry

Chapter 12      Literary Nonfiction

Chapter 13      Ethics

Chapter 14      Social Justice