ABSTRACT
The paradox of fiction is a comparatively recent problem in the philosophy of literature, around which a considerable industry has quickly developed. Although we take for granted that reading a novel, such as Anna Karenina, involves our engaging emotionally with the characters in the novel, Radford (1975) asserts that it does not make sense logically to claim that a reader responds emotionally to Anna Karenina and her travails, when reading the novel. Radford’s claim that it is paradoxical to have an emotional response to a fictitious character was received, by a generation of theorists, as an invitation to demonstrate why an emotional response to a fictional character is not, in principle, paradoxical.
