Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association 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 fiction that include history are among the greatest of classics. Fiction claims to be able to convey its own unique kinds of truth. But unless a reader knows in advance whether a narrative is fictional or not, judgment can be frustrated and confused. In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn argues that fiction does present specific clues to its fictionality, and its own justifications. Indeed, except in cases of deliberate deception, fiction achieves its purposes best by exercising generic conventions that inform the reader that it is fiction. Cohn tests her conclusions against major narrative works, including Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mann's Death in Venice, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Freud's case studies. She contests widespread poststructuralist views that all narratives are fictional. On the contrary, she separates fiction and nonfiction as necessarily distinct, even when bound together. An expansion of Cohn's Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton and the product of many years of labor and thought, The Distinction of Fiction builds on narratological and phenomenological theories to show that boundaries between fiction and history can be firmly and systematically explored.

For the first time, this collection brings together figures in both contemporary philosophy and Kierkegaard studies to explore pressing issues in the philosophy of personal identity and moral psychology.

Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cell examines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.

This book explores socio-cultural meanings of ‘self’ in the Chinese language through analysing a range of conversations among Chinese immigrants to Australia qualitatively on the topics of individuality, social relationships and collective identity. If language, culture and cognition are major roads, this book is the junction that unites them by arguing that selfhood occurs at their interface. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to unpack manifestations and perceptions of ‘self’ in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse from the perspectives of Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and the newly developed Cultural Linguistics. This book not only discusses empirical and theoretical issues on the conceptualisation and communication of social identity in a cross-cultural context, it also reveals how traditional and modern ideas in Chinese culture are interacting with those of other world cultures. Considering the power of language, enduring and emerging beliefs and stances that permeate these speakers’ views on their social being and outlooks on life impart their significance in cross-cultural communication and pragmatics. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Traces travel writing's evolution from classical times to the present, focusing on Anglo-American work since the eighteenth century. Examines texts by James Boswell, Mary Kingsley, Graham Greene, Peter Mathiessen, Naipaul and Chatwin.

A major, defining polarity in Euripidean drama, wisdom and folly, has never so far been the subject of a book-length study. The volume aims at filling this gap. Virtually all Euripidean characters, from gods to slaves, are subject to some aspect of folly and claim at least some measure of wisdom. The playwright’s sophisticated handling of the tradition and the pervasive ambiguity in his work add extra layers of complexity. Wisdom and folly become inextricably intertwined, as gods pursue their agendas and mortal characters struggle to control their destiny, deal with their troubles, confront their past, and chart their future. Their amoral or immoral behavior and various limitations often affect also their families and communities. Leading international scholars discuss wisdom and folly from various thematic angles and theoretical perspectives. A final section deals with the polarity’s reception in vase-painting and literature. The result is a wealth of fresh insights into moral, social and historical issues. The volume is of interest to students and scholars of classical drama and its reception, of philosophy, and of rhetoric

Figurally colored narration (FCN) is narrator’s discourse (whether in the first or third person) that adopts salient features of character’s text, mainly valuation and designation, without signaling the figural part in any way. Unlike free indirect discourse, FCN does not refer to current acts of consciousness, but to typical, characteristic segments of the character’s text. There are two main modes of FCN: contagion of the narrator’s discourse with a character’s text, and the more or less ironical reproduction of a character’s text in narrative discourse. In the latter case, the narrator’s criticism may refer to either the content of the character’s text or to its form of expression. This study begins with a definition and an example of FCN as a narrative device, followed by an analysis of terms used for FCN in German, Anglophone and Russian literary criticism. Building on the perception of FCN as a phenomenon of interference between narrator’s and character’s text (text interference), this book analyses the function and applications of FCN in narratives written in German, English and Russian.

Ayn al-Qudat is one of the geniuses of Islamic intellectual history and has even been described as the true father of deconstructionism. This text provides a clearly-written critical introduction to the intellectual, literary, religious and philosophical struggles of the 12th century as expressed by one of Islam's greatest and most radical writers.

This study investigates our multiple selves as manifested in how we use language. Applying philosophical contrastive pragmatics to original and translation of Japanese and English works, the concept of empty yet populated self in Japanese is explored.

All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker examines a range of classic and contemporary autobiographies—including those of St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Roland Barthes, Seamus Heaney, and J. M. Coetzee—to reveal a whole domain of life narrative that has been previously ignored, one that enables a new approach to the question of what constitutes a "good" life narrative. Moving from an ethics toward an aesthetics of life writing, Parker follows Wittgenstein's view that ethics and aesthetics are one. The Self in Moral Space is distinctive in that its key ethical question is not What is it right for the life writer to do? but the broader question What is it good to be? This question opens up an important debate with the dominant postmodern paradigms that prevail in life writing studies today. In Parker's estimation, such paradigms are incapable of explaining why life writing matters in the contemporary context. Life narrative, he argues, faces readers with the perennial ethical question How should a human being live? We need a new reconstructive paradigm, as offered by this book, in order to gain a fuller understanding of life narrative and its humanistic potential.