To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide , Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with (...) a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:"When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it ."1What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true. · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs , p.93. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. (shrink)

The reader's access to the fictional world of a novel is mediated by the narrator, when there is one; the fictional world is presented from the narrator's perspective. do depictions ever have anything comparable to narrators? apparent artists sometimes have a certain perspective on the fictional world. but they don't mediate our access to it; the fictional world is presented independently of their perspective on it. depictions do present fictional worlds from certain perspectives, but not usually the perspectives of any (...) fictional characters. however, there are characters in some special depictions, especially certain films, who function very much like narrators. (shrink)