Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel

The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel

Dawson, Paul

Paperback

Series: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0814258794
ISBN13: 9780814258798
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Jan 8 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In The Story of Fictional Truth, Paul Dawson looks anew at the historical relationship between the genre of the novel and the concept of fictionality, arguing that existing scholarship on the emergence of realist fiction has been shaped by the trope of the death of the novel. The unexplored logic of this premise is that the novel was born anticipating its own demise, with both its requiem and its reflexive origins legible in the ontological challenge of postmodern metafiction. To test this logic, Dawson traces shifting assumptions about what constitutes the illusion of fictional truth from early novels such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) to contemporary autofiction such as Megan Boyle's Liveblog (2018). In doing so, he contests and revises long-held views about the origins and functions of key formal features of the realist novel by investigating when and how they came to be seen as signposts of fictionality. Through this history, The Story of Fictional Truth opens up new ways to understand the novel's afterlife in a post-truth digital age characterized by a collapse of referentiality.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Dawson, Paul

View All

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All