AustLit

Author's notes:

Research background

Popular conceptions maintain that fiction results purely from imagination, but the relationship between fact and fiction has occupied philosophy and literature for centuries. Novelists since Aphra Behn (Oroonoko, 1688) have confirmed fact's importance in making fiction, while Chimamanda Adichie defined fiction's 'emotional truth' as 'a quality more resilient than fact' (2007: 9). Yet literary controversies such as those attached to Demidenko, Frey and Khouri indicate how anxiously some readers (and writers) negotiate the terrain between fact and fiction.

Research contribution

This work observes a collision between fact and fiction, information and impression, the objective and the subjective, and the real and the imagined. It wants the unsettled reader to muse: 'Did this really happen? Perhaps it did?'. It accomplishes this by presenting incontrovertible facts with outrageous imaginingsso the two become difficult to unravel, thus challenging instituted ethics related to literary deceptions in order to explore what sort of fictive experience will evolve.