The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology

is an influential figure, and aficionados will welcome the comprehensive exposition he provides here.--Terence Cave, TLS The pioneer of anthropology, Wolfgang Iser presents a wide-ranging and comprehensive exploration of this new field in an attempt to explain the human need for the particular form of make-believe known as literature. Ranging from the Renaissance pastoral to Coleridge to Sartre and Beckett, The Fictive and the Imaginary is a distinguished work of scholarship from one of Europe's most respected and influential critics. A new book by Wolfgang Iser is an important event in the critical world. This one, with its wide-ranging and ambitious argument, will require the attention of everyone who thinks seriously and at all philosophically about literary culture and what it has to tell us about being human.--Ross Chambers, University of Michigan.