Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

by Lubomír Doležel

With Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomír Doležel reexamines the claim—made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White—that "there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history."

Doležel rejects this assertion and demonstrates how literary and discourse theory can help the historian to restate the difference between fiction and history. He challenges scholars to reassess the postmodern viewpoint by reintroducing the idea of possible worlds. Possible-worlds semantics reveals that possible worlds of fiction and possible worlds of history differ in their origins, cultural functions, and structural and semantic features. Doležel’s book is the first systematic application of this idea to the theory and philosophy of history.

Possible Worlds of Fiction and History is the crowning work of one of literary theory’s most engaged thinkers.

Genres: Nonfiction

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Lubomír Doležel (b. 1922) is a literary theorist and one of the founders of the "fictional worlds" theory. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Philology from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He studied under several members of the Prague School, an influential centre of inter-war structuralist and semiotic thought.

Reviews

[Amanda]

I’m unimpressed - partly because I disagree, but his big example for historical writing is Schama? Really? Badly done, sir. Very badly done.

[Bookshire Cat]

Comprehensible and useful, aside from that weird chapter fangirling over Shama.