Truth, Fiction and Literature

This study examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis and cognitive value, founded on the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and sceptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction in science, logic, epistemology and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor and "making" in human thought processes.
Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigour and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically-sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. Stein Haugom Olsen is the author of "The Structure of Literary Understanding" and "The End of Literary Theory". Peter Lamarque is the editor of "Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics", and subject editor for the ten-volume "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics".