Fictional Worlds Thomas G.

Pavel | Harvard University Press

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Thomas G. Pavel

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LITERARY CRITICISM: General

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PAPERBACK
$28.00 20.95 25.20
ISBN 9780674299665
Publication: January 1989
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190 pages
6 x 9 1/4 inches
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Table of Contents

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote,
Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be
deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more
interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of
fiction, their properties and their reason for being.
Thomas Pavelis a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a
polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies
through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now
obsolete. Pavelargues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention
and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism
and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical
concerns. Along the way he takes its through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art,
religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

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