In this chapter I consider one of the necessary conditions for being a novelist, the ability to open up and sustain a fictional world. My approach will draw from psychopathology, phenomenology and neuroscience. Using the phenomenological concept of “multiple realities,” I argue that the novelist is in some ways like and in some ways unlike someone who experiences delusions insofar as the noveli...

Abstract A decade ago Rita Felski argued that reliance on context shuts down a text’s meaning by enclosing it in restrictive historical “box” and alienating its individuality. This essay offers rebuttal to Felski’s critique, first delineating the genealogy of her concerns literary, philosophical, architectural thought late nineteenth century, second exploring an alternative model as type, revea...

Although he died in 2008, prolific science novelist Michael Crichton – acting as a ‘ghost-writer’, so to speak – continues to add new titles to his oeuvre. Notwithstanding the death of the author, his novel-producing machinery refuses to come to a full stop, although in this case Richard Preston (a science novelist in his own right, author of, among others, The Hot Zone, on viral infections) wa...