InTRoducTIon 2 in chapter one, drawing upon, and extrapolating from, the pragmatic theory of relevance advanced by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. What follows in the rest of the book is an inquiry into the manifold implications of this view for narrative theory. Each chapter is an exploration of the way such a perspective upon fictionality cuts across core theoretical issues in the field, not primarily for the sake of what it does to received narratological opinion on those issues, but for the sake of the light it sheds on the idea of a rhetorical concept of fictionality. The overarching perspective I advocate and assume throughout these explorations is thrown into relief by the critique of familiar concepts that it enables. This process of theoretical refiguring also generates a number of suggestive specific claims, such as the view of fiction as a kind of exercise of narrative understanding in chapter two; the discrimination between instance, idiom and interpellation in chapter five; the conception of narrative as a cognitive faculty, and dreams as protofictions, in chapter six; the notion of narrative “rightness” as the benchmark of the fictive imagination in chapter seven; or the discursive model of affective engagement in chapter eight. The perspective on fictionality adopted here is in part a response to the changing scope and purpose of narrative theoretical inquiry. Narrative theory has always had grandly expansionist ambitions, but in recent years the pace of that expansion has tended to outstrip the range and adaptability of the available theoretical paradigms. Literary narrative, and literary fiction in particular, has been the test bed for most of the conceptual apparatus of narrative theory, but many of the basic assumptions entailed by that heritage, about both the nature of its object of inquiry and the appropriate disciplinary methodologies and objectives, look increasingly inappropriate and parochial. The burden of interest in narrative has shifted significantly towards other media, towards nonfictional forms, and towards disciplines beyond the English department, or indeed the humanities and social sciences. Narrative theory now finds itself addressing an object of study that may be as relevant to legal studies, medicine, computer science, artificial intelligence, or psychology as it is to literature. Theoretical discussion in any particular context (and my own bias in this book is avowedly literary) is always at risk of overgeneralization from its particulars, and consequently under a certain pressure of abstraction in order to accommodate the sheer range of narrative. Similarly, the scope of fictionality, and hence the nature of theoretical inquiry about it, has come to seem greater than it once did, and further removed from the particulars of any corpus of fictions. So although for me the question of fictionality arises in a literary context, it is necessarily implicated in ideas about much more inclusive