Geschichte der Fiktionalität

The ability to invent characters, places and events, to produce works of literary fiction, is one of the most important cultural practices in human history. The contributions to this volume are – from a variety of disciplines – concerned with the historicity of fictionality. Did all cultures invent stories at all times? Or is there a historical moment in which this practice first had to be ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’? What was the status of literary invention in Antiquity, in the Middle Ages or in Modernity? And what kind of role did fictionality play in non-western cultures? Based on these questions, the contributions discuss theoretical and methodological issues which are raised by the project of a “History of Fictionality”. These relate to problems with historical sources, different media or methods of evaluation. At the same time, the contributions also offer specific insights into the status of fictionality in their fields.

With contributions by
Benjamin Gittel, Wolfgang Rösler, Henrike Manuwald, Sebastian Kleinschmidt und Verena Linder-Spohn, Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Roman Kuhn, Christopher Meid, Frank Zipfel, Mathis Lessau, Marc Wurich, Françoise Lavocat, Johannes Franzen.