Abstract
What is fictional and what is not is something both author and reader wrestle with, and this poetic and rhetorical contract between the one and the other means that while the balance between them can be upset, it is difficult to forget the relation between author and reader when discussing texts. Fiction helps to define the world by what it is not. It reflects, deflects, and refracts the world in a prismatic light, sometimes beyond our spectrum. The fictional can be about the possible and the probable while addressing the improbable and the impossible. The liminal space of historical fictions provides a threshold between fictional and historical worlds. The author can seem like a tyrant to the countless number of readers obscure to the times and to the sweep of history or like someone having a conversation with the readers. If the author appeared to have a great deal of authority in New Criticism, he or she came to be tested with reader-response theory, reception theory, deconstruction, and historicism. Reader and context untied the text as the object. The cemeteries are full of those who could not read and of readers who did not record their careful observations or responses to the works of authors. Sometimes a few responses occurred, and certainly commentaries on poetry and the Bible, often by readers who were also writers, provided criticism and an interpretative context.
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Notes
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© 2012 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2012). The Author Makes a Comeback. In: Fictional and Historical Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_3
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