Second, they distinguish between fictional content and fictional mode, illustrating the difference by reference to Konrad Kujau’s forgery which was presented to the world as Hitler’s(genuine) diaries. As they remark, while it would be reasonable to refer to the content of this forgery as fictional, ‘we should surely hesitate to call the finished product a “work of fiction” given the mode of its presentation’ (17). These distinctions allow them to focus not on the structural or semantic properties of sentence ‘but on the conditions under which they are uttered, the attitudes they invoke, and the role that they play in social interactions’ (32). Such an approach leads to a stress on fictional storytelling as a convention with institutional resources or, to put it another way, as a more or less universally understood custom or family of customs within a culture.
If fiction is in one sense universal, those fictions that we call novels and short stories are arguably possessed of certain unique features. Dorrit Cohn’s excellent recent book The Distinction of fiction (1999) approaches the definition of fiction from a narratological perspective, and makes an impressively energetic case for the distinctiveness of literary fiction, arguing against certain recent attempts to erase the dividing line between (for example) fiction and history, or to argue that fictional and non-fictional narratives are essentially indistinguishable.