Editorial: Towards a History of the Modern Practice of Fiction

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Literary Theory is devoted to the »History of the Modern Practice of Fiction«. As this title already signals, the idea for this Special Issue stems, on the one hand, from a certain way of thinking about the phenomenon of fiction developed in literary theory and philosophy and, on the other hand, from research carried out in the historical disciplines. The property that makes a literary work a piece of fiction – henceforth: the property of ›fictionality‹ – is increasingly understood as a social practice, which is essentially determined by sets of rules for authors and readers and their shared knowledge of these rules. At the same time, researchers in literary and cultural studies tenaciously pursue the idea that what we nowadays call fictionality, fictionality in the modern sense, has a colorful history worth studying. Although these strands of research have so far existed relatively independent one from another due to disciplinary boundaries, three research developments over the last decades favor an integrated approach for a history of the modern practice of fiction.1 These developments are: First, the growing importance of pragmatist approaches in the humanities in general (cf. Schatzki/Knorr-Cetina/von Savigny 2001) and in fiction theory in particular has established an interface between fiction theory and literary historiography. Fictionality is increasingly understood as a social practice, or, in other words, as a social institution that is essentially determined by sets of rules for authors and readers and their shared knowledge of these rules (cf. Lamarque/ Olsen 1994; Zipfel 2001, esp. 279–287; Köppe 2014a; Zipfel 2016; Konrad 2017; cf. also Eco 1994, 75, for the related idea of a contract or ›fictional agreement‹ between authors and readers). Since these rules concern the production and the reception of fictional texts, institutional theories of fiction typically integrate insights from production-oriented speech act theories (cf. Searle 1975; Currie 1990; Genette 1991), as well as from reception-oriented approaches (cf. Ryan