The nature of fiction has long been debated across the humanities, and is of considerable importance for philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, narratology and the history of ideas in general.This volume offers something that has so far been unavailable: a selection of multidisciplinary perspectives on fiction written by an international team of contributors at the forefront of their fields, providing the reader with a spectrum of approaches to compare and contrast. The volume is divided between historical, cognitive, aesthetic and non-western approaches, and targets a wide range of topics, including mathematics, history, religion and metaphysics. This is a seminal volume on one of the most important topics in the humanities.