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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Introduction: Under the Jealous Gaze of Truth -- 1. Are Fictional Worlds Possible? -- 2. Questions About the Nature of Fiction -- 3. Fortress Fiction -- 4. Literary Fictions and Philosophical Theories: The Possible-Worlds Story -- 5. On Fictional Discourse -- 6. The Perception of Fictional Worlds -- 7. Beyond Reality and Fiction? The Fate of Dualism in the Age of (Mass) Media -- 8. Models, Madness, and the Hereafter -- 9. Characters and Their Versions -- 10. Naming Names in Telling Tales -- 11. Fictionality, Narration, and the Question of Genres -- 12. Narratology, Narratological Criticism, and Gender -- 13. The Renaissance Dialogue and Its Zero-Degree-Fictionality -- 14. Signposts in Oral Epic: Metapragmatic and Metasemantic Signals -- 15. Of Worlds and Nutshells: On Casanova's Icosameron -- 16. Ironies of History: The joke of Milan Kundera -- 17. The Politics of Impossible Worlds -- 18. Thoughts on Aristotle's Poetics -- 19. Chronotopes in Diegesis -- 20. Deconstructing Bakhtin -- 21. Scratching the Bronze Mirror: Looking for Traces of Fictionality in Chinese Poetics -- 22. Formalist and Structuralist Activity in Poland: Tradition and Progress -- 23. An Improbable Side by Side: Dolezel and Borges in Prague -- 24. Lubomfr Dolezel' s Contribution to Contemporary Literary Studies -- Bibliography Novels, movies, and lies – these are all fictions that provoke with their as ifs and what ifs. In response to the idea that fiction has somehow become an unfashionable topic in contemporary criticism, this volume argues that the question of fiction needs to be updated in the absence of a widely accepted theory of truth. This collection, dedicated to the noted scholar and literary critic Lubomir Dolezel, covers an extensive number of theoretical and historical issues relevant to our understanding of the status of fictions – literary or not. Fiction Updated offers approaches to fiction and poetics that, in an imaginary topography of contemporary humanities, dwell at a distance from both the mimetic theory of literature and deconstruction. The contributors introduce new perspective to the problem of fictionality, or broaden the scope of its applications, by examining the works of such authors as Homer, Casanova, Aristotle, Woolf, Vaihinger, Borges, Kundera, Coetzee, and Bakhtin. The collection is divided into six thematic sections. The first includes papers that attempt to approach the issue of fictionality from philosophical perspective. The second section is also theoretical and concentrates on models. The third emphasizes the more concrete problems of fictional worlds, such as character, genre, and gender. The four section deals with fiction and history, while the fifth treats poetics. The las section focuses on the contribution of Lubomir Dolezel to the theory of fictionality and fictional semantics
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