This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is

important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status

among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world Ptself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and

make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in

their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing.

Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hull, England, and has recently been appointed Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) and the Australian National University. He is the editor of Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics (Aberdeen University Press, 1983). Stein Haugom Olsen is Professor of British Civilization Studies at the University of Oslo, and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science (arts section). He is the author of The Structure of Literary Understanding (CUP, 1978) and The End of Literary Theory (CUP, 1987). Stein Haugom Olsen is Professor of British Civilization Studies at the University of Oslo, and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science (arts section). He is the author of The Structure of Literary Understanding (CUP, 1978) and The End of Literary Theory (CUP, 1987).