Factual Fictions
The Origins of the English Novel

Lennard J. Davis

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.
Paper 1997 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1610-3 | $27.50s | £18.00 | Add to shopping cart

"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the hidden contradictions in a genre that, even in the age of Derrida and De Man, readers are inclined to take at face value."—Village Voice

"Factual Fictions is fresh, well-written, and often illuminating. Lennard Davis makes us see the novel as a text among other texts, an autonomous object determined by society's laws, culture, and technology as much as by the special qualities of its author and audience, and a reflection of that 'lost moment' when one might observe 'the unity of news, novels, ideology, history, fact, and fiction'."—Yearbook of English Studies

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