Fiction has its historical and cultural dimensions; if fiction seems to be universally present in the lives of all human beings, it nevertheless assumes different forms in different ages and different societies. It seems clear that myths the fictions of a non-literate culture operate differently from the fictional element in Charles Dicken’s Dombey and son(1847-8) or Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verse (1988). This last example also serves to remind us that the connections between fiction and the world may not only be complex but may vary from reader to reader or culture to culture.
In their book Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen provide us with a number of useful distinctions with which to approach this complex topic. First, they differentiate between what they call the ‘object’ and the ‘description’ sense of the term ‘fiction’ , arguing that a fictional character is a fiction in the object sense while a work of fiction is a fiction in the description sense:
To say of a thing that it is fictional is to suggest that it does not exist, the implied association being between what is fictional and what is unreal. To say of a description that it is fictional is to suggest that it is not true, the implied association being between what is fictional and what is false. (lamarque and olsen 1994, 16)