Accessibility statement

Fictionality

Fictionality group logo

Before the formation of the ICNS, the Fictionality group was set up as a way to develop shared research interests across the boundaries of the period-based research schools in the English Department. The group had in common an interest in the question of fiction as a discursive and rhetorical category, rather than an ontological one, and the consequent sensitivity of that category to specific historical and cultural contexts. Members of the group were interested in the social and political implications of such a contingent pragmatics of fictive discourse in the early and high Middle Ages, in Israel and Palestine, in the Arabic literary tradition, in post-colonial literatures at large, and in post-9/11 America.

The Fictionality theme takes up these concerns in theory and criticism, and brings the research of the York Fictionality group into contact with related developments in narrative theory internationally. The Fictionality network has particularly strong connections in Denmark, with the Centre for Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University, but also with the universities of Freiburg and Giessen in Germany and Project Narrative at Ohio State University, among others. 

Current research themes