Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies The border between fact and fiction has been trespassed so often it seems to be a highway. Works of history that include fictional techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of ficti[...]

In "Why Fiction?", one of the most important works of narrative theory to come out of France in recent years, Jean-Marie Schaeffer understands fiction not as a literary genre but - in contrast to all other literary theorists - as a genre of life. The result is arguably the first systematic refutatio[...]