Novels, movies, and lies – these are all fictions that provoke with their as ifs and what ifs. In response to the idea that fiction has somehow become an unfashionable topic in contemporary criticism, this volume argues that the question of fiction needs to be updated in the absence of a widely accepted theory of truth. This collection, dedicated to the noted scholar and literary critic Lubomir Dolezel, covers an extensive number of theoretical and historical issues relevant to our understanding of the status of fictions – literary or not.

Fiction Updated offers approaches to fiction and poetics that, in an imaginary topography of contemporary humanities, dwell at a distance from both the mimetic theory of literature and deconstruction. The contributors introduce new perspective to the problem of fictionality, or broaden the scope of its applications, by examining the works of such authors as Homer, Casanova, Aristotle, Woolf, Vaihinger, Borges, Kundera, Coetzee, and Bakhtin.

The collection is divided into six thematic sections. The first includes papers that attempt to approach the issue of fictionality from philosophical perspective. The second section is also theoretical and concentrates on models. The third emphasizes the more concrete problems of fictional worlds, such as character, genre, and gender. The four section deals with fiction and history, while the fifth treats poetics. The las section focuses on the contribution of Lubomir Dolezel to the theory of fictionality and fictional semantics.

Calin-Andrei Mihailescu is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Modern Languages Department, University of Western Ontario.

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Walid Hamarneh is an assistant professor in the Arabic and Comparative Literature Departments, University of Texas, Austin.

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