fiction as a mode of representation—a way of describing individuals and events—that is strikingly different from representation concerned with truth, the latter, long a dominant theme in philosophy.
Not only is faithfulness to truth in the ordinary sense not a requirement in fiction; fiction may even depart from truth in the things it talks about, which typically include nonexistent individuals and even members of nonexistent kinds (Holmes and hobbits, for example)—
fictional claim like “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective”: something we know not to be literally true (after all, there never was a Sherlock Holmes) but accept as true in some derivative or at least nonliteral sense unlike “Holmes was a plodding policeman”, say
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