Imagination and the content of fiction

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 136-149

  Savile, Anthony ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 60949877273     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.2.136     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1990), p. 79.
2. A considerable grain of salt is in place even here. Think of A. J. A. Symons's observation that 'A biography can never be objectively true; that is what distinguishes it from a record of social or historical fact. The reflection cast back by any good biography resembles one of those compound faces made by newspapers for the amusement of their readers, blending perhaps an artist's eyes and forehead with a criminal's nose and mouth. The features in a biography are all distinct enough, and they are recognizably the features of the subject; but the hunted eyes and the hunting nose, the wafer-thin mouth and the rocky chin, are the biographer's own' (The Quest for Corvo: Genius or Charlatan? [Harmondsworth, 1966], p. 9).
3. William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays (London, 1903; first published 1839), p. 173.
4. For discussion of this theme, see my 'Narrative Theory: Ancient or Modern?', Philosophical Papers (1989), pp. 28-52.
5. 'In the process of arriving at the finished work, the artist has continually to employ violence. A poet writes: "The mast-high anchor dives through a cleft", changes it to "The anchor dives through closing paths", changes it again to "The anchor dives among hayricks", and finally to "The anchor dives through the floors of a church". A cleft and closing paths have been liquidated, and hayricks deported to another stanza' (W. H. Auden 'The Poet and the City', in The Dyer's Hand [London: Faber and Faber, 1962], p. 85).