8 Literature is somehow outside of, or exempt from, the laws of truth and fiction that govern other situations. The class of genres we call imaginative literature somehow invokes a set of quotation marks that serve to insulate its statements from the scrutiny any other claim should expect. A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary. It's tempting to refer to the intention of the authors, especially since most commentators on lying insist that a lie is not simply an untruth but an intentional untruth. If there are non-affirmative quotation marks, they have to be on the page somewhere.
Form provides one conspicuous set of indicators.
But pure formalism will take us only so far. We'd like to imagine that we could examine any extended falsehood and pigeonhole it as salutary fiction or pernicious fraud. We get a lot of help from the institutional mechanisms that have grown up with print culture. But not every work is so clear. In the eighteenth century, it was a widespread convention to preface works of fiction with more or less solemn protestations that they are not fiction at all.