fictionality

English

Etymology

fictional +‎ -ity

Noun

fictionality (countable and uncountable, plural fictionalities)

1. State or quality of being fictional.
   • 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.