How could he be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time? The TRUTH is what is. FICTION is not reality—but it can help us to see the TRUTH through stories, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Wolf. LIES deceive, for evil purposes, and for good purposes. But what happens when what we think is the TRUTH turns out to be a LIE? In his ninth decade, the author, who has spent his life creating FICTION to examine TRUTH, decided to write the story of his life, truthfully. But, in the process of examining his life—his prayers, works, joys and sufferings—he discovers it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the TRUTH from the LIES. And the chief insights into the reality of a life he thought noble, his FICTION—often in the form of dreams—reveals his true nature as a failure in his professed faith—until a good woman shows him the way out of his dark forest.

How could he be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time? The TRUTH is what is. FICTION is not reality—but it can help us to see the TRUTH through stories, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Wolf. LIES deceive, for evil purposes, and for good purposes. But what happens when what we think is the TRUTH turns out to be a LIE? In his ninth decade, the author, who has spent his life creating FICTION to examine TRUTH, decided to write the story of his life, truthfully. But, in the process of examining his life—his prayers, works, joys and sufferings—he discovers it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the TRUTH from the LIES. And the chief insights into the reality of a life he thought noble, his FICTION—often in the form of dreams—reveals his true nature as a failure in his professed faith—until a good woman shows him the way out of his dark forest.

This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.

The most critically acclaimed literary biography published in the UK in 2004, tells the story of B.S. Johnson, one of Britain's most innovative, passionate, and controversial writers of the 1960s and 70s, an unflinching advocate for the avant-garde who worked firmly in the tradition of Joyce and Beckett.

Vols. for 1939-1944 include the Annual report of the Australian English Association; v. for 1945-1946 include the Annual report of the Sydney Branch of the English Association.