The Distinction of Fiction

The border between fact and fiction is often trespassed. Works of history that include fictional techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of fiction that include history are among the greatest of classics. Fiction claims to be able to convey its own unique kind of truths, but unless a reader knows in advance whether a narrative is fictional or not, judgement can be frustrated and confused. In this work, the author engages the long and complicated arguments that have taken up these issues, providing a survey of the disputes and major disputants. She argues that fiction does present specific clues to its fictionality and its own justifications. Except in cases of deliberate fraud, fiction achieves its purposes best by exercising generic conventions that inform the reader that it is fiction. Cohn tests her conclusions against major narrative works including Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu", Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Freud's case studies. She contests widespread poststructuralist views that all narrative views are fictional. Instead, she separates fiction and non-fiction as necessarily distinct, even when most bound together.
An expansion of Cohn's Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, the work demonstrates that there are boundaries, and that they are better understood for what they encompass than what they exclude.