Inconvenient Fictions

This book engages some of the important issues in literary theory and literary study, investigating the structuralist and post-structuralist denial that cognitive gains can be made from the reading of fiction and poetry, and seeking to reverse this estimate of the relative epistemic credentials of literature and theory. Its thesis is that the boundaries between literary texts and "natural reality" are permeable in subtler ways than are allowed for in current accounts of "literary language", and that in consequence literary fictions are capable of exploring real possibilities. The book pursuses these themes through both critical and theoretical discussion of a wide variety of texts and authors, with sections on biblical parable, Shakespeare, Sterne, Wordsworth, E.M. Forster, Muriel Spark, Frank Kermode, Derrida de Man and others.