The Fictive And The Imaginary: Charting Literar... May 2026

: The book explores these concepts through various literary periods, ranging from Renaissance pastoralism to the works of Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. Critical Reception

: Literature "stages" the interaction between the real and the imaginary. This staging creates a "virtual" space where the reader can bridge gaps or blanks in the text to generate meaning.

: An intentional act by the author that subverts and reorganizes "the real." It is a boundary-crossing act that disrupts the referential world, making it "transgressive". The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literar...

: The pool of mental images and fantasies within the reader. It provides the "flesh" to fill out the fictive structures during the act of reading . Key Concepts and Themes

: Iser argues that because literature allows humans to step out of themselves and experience "otherness," it serves as a tool for self-confrontation and exploring human plasticity. : The book explores these concepts through various

: Iser suggests humans use fiction as a "subsidy" for their existence, using imagination as collateral to substantiating their activities and lives.

: Refers to the empirical world and the existing social, historical, and cultural systems that circulate within it. : An intentional act by the author that

Iser replaces the binary of fiction and reality with a consisting of the real, the fictive, and the imaginary.