Mimesis and the As-If: A Narrative Review of Fiction, Verisimilitude, and Representation
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Fiction is the art of being untrue in a way that tells the truth, and the theory of fiction---its representation, its verisimilitude, and its peculiar contract with the real---is one of the oldest and most productive problems of literary thought. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that problem, from Plato's Republic, whose banishment of the imitators fixed mimesis as the question, and Aristotle's Poetics, whose answer---mimesis of action, probability and necessity, the plot as the soul of tragedy---made verisimilitude the standard of fiction's truth, through the modern corpus: Auerbach's Mimesis, the grand history of reality's representation from Homer to Woolf, Watt's rise of the novel and its formal realism, Barthes' reality effect, the insignificant details that signify the real itself, Vaihinger's philosophy of the As-If, the fictional constructs that science and art both employ, Lewis' truth in fiction and the possible-worlds analysis, Walton's mimesis as make-believe, Pavel's fictional worlds, Ryan's possible worlds and narrative theory, Iser's act of reading, in which the fiction's world is completed by its reader, and Genette's narrative discourse, the grammar of representation itself. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the representational core, in which mimesis is defended, historicized, and grammatically dissected; the verisimilitude program, in which probability, realism, and the reality effect replaced truth as fiction's standard; and the fictional-world theories, in which make-believe, possible worlds, and the reader's response gave fiction its ontology. It is concluded that the theory of fiction converges on a single insight---fiction's world is a game of as-if whose rules are made explicit by the theory---and that from Aristotle's probability to Walton's make-believe, the century-long tradition remains the deepest account of how the untrue reveals the real.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204656347