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“Is This Real?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2018

Extract

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.

Type
Roundtable: Telling It Like It Wasn't, by Catherine Gallagher
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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