The Novel Experience

The Novel Experience introduces new approaches to the study of narrative fiction, for scholars, critics, teachers, and readers. At the heart of this concise book is a conception of experience that is influenced by the musings of third-century Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna on the fictionality of truth and the emptiness of reality. Combining this insight with Nietzsche's method of intellectual genealogy and William James's transformation of emotion into "pure experience," Helmut Müller-Sievers propos