Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction

In Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the "postmodern" expansion of fictionality-the feeling today that the line between the real and the invented is harder to draw-and argues that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups to define how we tell and use "literary" stories. He discusses the literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed; paraliterary forms like science fiction an…