Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel
"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the hidden contradictions in a genre that, even in the age of Derrida and De Man, readers are inclined to take at face value."—Village Voice"Factual Fictionsis fresh, well-written, and often illuminating. Lennard Davis makes us see the novel as a text among other texts, an autonomous object determined by society's laws, culture, and technology as much as by the special qualities of its author and audience, and a reflection of that 'lost moment' when one might observe 'the unity of news, novels, ideology, history, fact, and fiction'."—Yearbook of English Studies