Thursday, January 24, 2008

"Fiction and the Weave of Life"

New from Oxford University Press: Fiction and the Weave of Life by John Gibson.

About the book, from the publisher:
Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition, yet ever since Plato, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not our world, but other worlds (what we might call 'fictional worlds')? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world.