Fiction and Art

The nature of fiction has long been debated across the humanities, and is of considerable importance for philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, narratology and the history of ideas. This volume offers something entirely new: a selection of multidisciplinary perspectives on fiction written by an international team of contributors at the forefront of their fields, providing a spectrum of approaches to compare and contrast. This volume, divided between historical, cognitive, aesthetic and non-western approaches, targets a wide range of topics, including mathematics, history, religion and metaphysics. This is a seminal volume on one of the most important topics in the humanities.

Ananta Sukla is a former Professor and Head of the Department of English at Sambalpur University and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Aesthetics, University of Uppsala, Sweden. His publications include Art and Representation (2001), Art and Experience (2003), Art and Essence (2003), and Art and Expression (2011).

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ananta Sukla
I. Historical Perspectives
1. Fiction's False Start
David Konstan
2. The Poetic Pragmatics of Greek Myths:
Referential Fiction and Ritual Performance
Claude Calame
II. Interdisciplinary Perspectives
3. Fictionality of the Absolute:
On Truth and Lie in the Metaphysical and Aesthetic Sense
Peter Heron
4. Mathematical Fictions
Jody Azzouni
5. Why Suicide Bomber Bombs: Fictionality of Rituals
Ivan Strenski
6. Fiction and History
Allen Speight
7. Cognitive Value of (Literary) Fiction
Robert Stecker
8. Fiction, Cognition, and Confusion
Jukka Mikkonen
9. Epistemology and Fiction: Thought Experiments in Personal Identity
Aleks Zarnitsyn
10. Semantics of Fiction: Naming and Metonymy
Carl Ehrett
11. The Fictional Truth: Nonfiction and Narration
Sarah Worth
12. Fiction as a Creative Process
Amanda Garcia
13. Fiction and Emotion:
The Relation of Consciousness to the Economy of Evolution
Samuel Kimball
III. Aesthetic Perspectives
14. How to Reach Fictional Worlds
Lubomír Dolezel
15. Literature, Fictionality, and the Illusion of Self-Presence
Samuel Kimball
16. Judicial Fiction and Literary Fiction:
The Example of the Factum
Christian Biet
17. Pictorial Fiction:
Imagination and Power of Picasso's Images
Charles Altieri
18. Sonic Fiction: The Truth in Music
Geraldine Finn
19. Gestural Fiction: Dance
Renee Conroy
20. Fictionality of theTheatrical Performance
Roderick Nicholls
21. Fictionality in Film and Photography
David Fenner
22. Fictions Sharing Subjectivity
Rob van Gerwen
IV. Oriental Perspectives
23. Fundamentals of Fiction in Indian Mythology, Poetics and Dramaturgy
Ananta Sukla
24. Fiction in the Chinese Mythical and Literary Traditions
Amy Lee
25. Truth and Fiction in the Japanese Narrative:
Sakaguchi Ango's Critique of the I-Novel
Robert Steen
26. Fiction in the Medieval Arabic Literary Tradition
Arkady Nedel
A Concluding Note
Ananta Sukla
Integrated Bibliography and Works Cited
Index