fictionality

English

Etymology

From fictional +‎ -ity.

Noun

fictionality (countable and uncountable, plural fictionalities)

1. State or quality of being fictional.
   • 1979, Erhardt Güttgemanns, Candid Questions Concerning Gospel Form Criticism, page 132:

     To be sure the anticipatory proleptics of the "historical survey in future-form" associated with pseudonymity rests upon the literary fiction of the pre-historicality of the revelation of these secrets; but this fictionality is intended to emphasize precisely by means of its esoteric quality that God will allow the elect righteous (cf. I Enoch 1:1) and wise persons (cf. I Enoch 100:6, 104:12) of the present day to participate already in his revelation that has proceeded from the mouths of the righteous and wise ones of pre-history, through the "literary" medium of the book.

   • 1987, Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction:

     But, of course, characters in postmodernist narrative fictions, too, can become aware of their own fictionality—characters such as Julia the policeman's wife, or the magazine-reader in Burroughs' Exterminator!, or the fictional author in Barth's "Life-Story."

   • 1996, Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass, page 257:

     As I discuss later, as well, authors within the realistic mode often encode their texts with markers of not only a self-conscious fictionality but also an irony regarding their projects that is, I would maintain, meant to be discovered.