Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel Book

In semiotic terms, fictional space consists of three basic areas of signification: the spaces of the teller, tale, and told. This work uses the terms "speaker," "fictional world," and "reader." Carl Malmgren examines the signifying systems that constitute these three components or "subspaces" and discusses the dynamics of their interrelations. He then applies this theoretical framework to American fiction of the twentieth century and finds that differences in fictional form result from simple transformations performed on the subspaces of the text, transformations that significantly alter narrative ontology and the reader's relation to the texts.