Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard

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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.

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This event was on Wed, 28 Oct 2020

John Mullan, Visiting Professor of English Literature

Professor John Mullan

Visiting Professor of English Literature

Professor John Mullan is the Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at University College London. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and is at present writing the volume of the Oxford English Literary History that will cover the period from 1709 to 1784.

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