Grounded in its own reality: exploring what happens when we step into the fictional worlds of novels
Daniel Wright was a voracious reader growing up, eventually developing what he calls “a deep obsession” with Agatha Christie. That fascination drove his desire to understand why novels hook so many of us, a question he’s pursued as a researcher, teacher and author – most recently of a new book about fictional worlds.
“Much of my work is about exploring what’s happening in novels to make me and so many others love reading them,” says Wright, an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto based on the U of T Mississauga campus. He published The Grounds of the Novel through Stanford University Press earlier this year.
“In this book, I look at the nature of fictional being – essentially how we think of fictional characters and worlds as sort of real – and sort of not real – at the same time.”
When Wright was an undergraduate student pursuing a joint degree in English and philosophy, he encountered the work of philosophers who reduced the matter of realness to a binary debate about whether these fictions exist in the actual world. This way of thinking felt limiting to him.
In The Grounds of the Novel, Wright instead argues that novels have their own kind of existence, or “grounds,” of being. “I wanted to take fictional being seriously,” he says, “and find a way to describe what novels are doing when I as a reader feel as if I’m entering a world that’s like my own, but also somehow distinct and detached from it.”