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one hand the significant works devoted to the subject, almost each of the last ten years has seen the publication of several important books on the aesthetics of fiction. It might be useful at this point, therefore, to attempt a brief summary of both the history and the contemporary preoccupations of fictional aesthetics. My attempt will be to clarify an increasingly complex and far ranging subject by means of brevity and occasionally by means of obviousness and over-simplification. I will begin with a cursory historical account of the serious interest in fic-