Convincing Fiction

How does fiction make itself seem like fact?

Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a 'strange surprising' story seem entirely 'probable' (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked to use). He will explore the tradition of factuality in the English novel, ending with the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and examples of recent auto-fiction.

A lecture by John Mullan 28 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/convincing-fiction

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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