Actual Fictions

Download or read book Actual Fictions written by Roel Smeets and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element sheds a new light on the ubiquitous yet complex notion of mimesis. By systematically comparing the social dynamics of the Dutch population at a given time with the social dynamics of characters in Dutch literary fiction published in the same period, it aims to pinpoint the ways in and the extent with which literary fiction either mirrors or shapes the societal context from which it emerged. While close-reading-based scholarship on this topic has been limited to qualitative interpretations of allegedly exemplary works, the present study uses the data-driven tools of social network analysis to systematically determine the imitative elements of the social dynamics of characters within larger-scale, representative collections of books of literary fiction.