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School has never been easy for Timothy Speare. He's had his share of strict teachers, bullies, mean girls, and stressful amounts of homework. If that's not enough, he and his two best friends are labeled as the Nerdy Trio by the whole school. But his junior year of high school might be his toughest yet after he learns a dark secret. Some of the students aren't real . . . They're Fictional. Coming from a world where fiction is fact, literature's greatest villains have banded together and have invaded our non-Fictional world. They may look like ordinary high school students, but in secret they are monsters, witches, and other villains in disguise with plans to take over the world. They may not be the most popular kids on campus, but the Nerdy Trio may be the only hope of stopping this true-to-life Fictional evil. They've read about heroes. Now the Nerdy Trio will learn what it means to be a hero when they step up to defend their world. Joining forces with a mysterious new girl, they will find magical items, face great danger, and learn about the dark history of their school--all in their mission to bring about the end of the Fictionals.

Fictional space is the imaginal expanse of field created by fictional discourse; a space which, through ultimately self-referential and self-validating, necessarily exists in ascertainable relation to the real world outside the text. After defining his theoretical framework the author applies it to American fiction of the twentieth century.

Drawing on insights from literary theory and analytical philosophy, this book analyzes the intersection of law and literature from the distinct and unique perspective of fictional discourse. Pursuing an empirical approach, and using examples that range from Victorian literature to the current judicial treatment of rap music, the volume challenges the prevailing fact–fiction dichotomy in legal theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the peculiarities of legal fictionality, while also contributing further material to fictional theory’s endeavor to find a transdisciplinary valid criterion for a definition of fictional discourse. Following the basic presumptions of the early law-as-literature movement, past approaches have mainly focused on textuality and narrativity as the common denominators of law and literature, and have largely ignored the topic of fictionality. This volume provides a much needed analysis of this gap. The book will be of interest to scholars of legal theory, jurisprudence and legal writing, along with literature scholars and students of literature and the humanities.

First published in 1990, this work offers an analysis of the phenomenon of encyclopaedism in literature. Hilary Clark develops the theory of an encyclopaedic form in the interests of making clear distinctions between the realist narrative form and that of the encyclopaedic-parodic or fictional encyclopaedia. She makes clear the special links that non-realist, parodic fictions have with the forms of essay, Menippean satire and epic, and indeed with the encyclopaedia itself. The study pays particular attention to the way in which literary encyclopaedism has flourished in the twentieth century, with special reference to the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Philippe Sollers.

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

ed. by Stefan Leder ; Beitr. teilw. engl., teilw. dt., teilw. franz. ; Beitr. teilw. dt., teilw. engl., teilw. franz.

With cases studies used throughout to help illustrate the more general points, this is an analysis of the most important characteristics of television dialogue, with a focus on fictional television. The book illustrates how we can fruitfully and systematically analyse the language of television.

Ever since the 1990s, school shootings have shocked the public in their brutality, their suddenness, and their inexplicability. While film and literature have played a role in the heated debates about so-called copycat crimes, the growing body of fictionalizations of school shootings has been neglected thus far. However, in a discourse in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, this book shows how fiction shapes and structures, challenges and disrupts cultural processes of meaning-making. Hence, for a better understanding of the school shooting phenomenon, the relevance of fiction on all levels of discourse construction requires thorough analysis. This book therefore develops a new approach to the role of fiction for contemporary forms of excessive violence. By combining narrative theory with insights from sociology and other disciplines, it provides the means for apprehending and describing the relevance of fiction for contemporary discourses. Furthermore, it provides exemplary analyses of more specific functions of literary and filmic fictionalizations of school shootings between 2000 and 2016.

For almost two millennia, Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions, but in the last century a new way of reimagining the man from Galilee and rewriting the canonical Gospels has sprung up in the form of Jesus novels. While the novels themselves are as varied as their authors, this work aims at introducing readers to some common literary strategies and theological agendas found in this rewriting phenomenon by surveying a few prominent examples. It also explores the question of what happens when we examine the intertextual play between these Gospel rewrites and their Gospel progenitors as we allow these contemporary novels to pose new questions to their ancient counterparts. An intriguing hermeneutical circle ensues as we embark on our quest for the fictional Jesus and accompany his incarnations as they lead us back to reexamine the canonical portraits of Jesus anew.