Approaching Islamicate fictionalities

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of medieval literature have turned to questions of fictionality both as an interrogation of premodern discursive strategies and as a challenge to presentist approaches (Allen and Chen, 2020; Karnes 2020; Keegan 2021; Orlemanski 2019.) What power did fiction hold among various medieval audiences, and what was its material life? How can scholars today identify and characterise medieval fictionality, and how do these approaches differ from the writers and critics who composed and analysed this material in the past? In tangling with premodern fictionality, what critiques of modernity and its genealogies become possible?Historically, much of the discourse around medieval fictionality in academic contexts has centered around canonical texts in western European languages, particularly Latin, Old French, and Middle English (Haug 1992;Green 2002). But with an increased recognition of the Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.