What Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading as Fiction and Reading as Non-fiction?

Abstract

Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of fiction, this chapter criticises a range of arguments from philosophy and literary theory that argue for a difference in the experience of reading fiction and reading non-fiction. It concludes that the difference is overstated; that the reality is complicated, and that a reader’s experience is a function of purposes the author had in writing and the reader has in reading, and that (as Stacie Friend has argued) more attention needs to be paid to genre—and that non-fiction is itself a genre (or rather a collection of genres).