Creating Fictional Contexts

Abstract

Abstract In Chapter 2, I suggested that one important and under-investigated type of knowledge is ‘text-specific’ knowledge. To make sense of full, real texts, such as novels, a reader must have background information about specific entities and about the configurations of entities which occur in specific situations. This chapter describes how the reader needs to create mental representations of the fictional context, collecting information from the text and maintaining an awareness of these facts whilst the subsequent text is read. Chapter 5 continues the discussion with regard to multiple contexts and Chapter 6 considers the implications of this discussion of context for mental representations of characters.