What Is Fiction For?

<p>How can literature which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations offer any insight into the workings of human reality or the human condition? Can mere words illuminate something that we call reality? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition he seeks to show how literary fiction by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances allows us to focus on the roots in social practice of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein Sartre Merleau-Ponty Foucault Derrida F. R. Leavis Cleanth Brooks and Stanley Fish and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift Woolf Appelfeld and Dickens among others this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies and of the study of the Humanities more generally by a distinguished scholar.</p>