Blending Fiction and the Real: Discerning the Most Robust Evolutionary Pattern in Narrative Literature

The most common understanding of fiction is as a piece of literature that describes imaginary events and people, something invented and not true. In this sense, fiction can be explained and understood as standing in opposition to the reality. If we instead look at fiction from the perspective of biopoetics and cognitive theory, it becomes clear that it does not show a sharply defined opposition to reality. It is this fuzziness of boundaries between fiction and the real that we are concerned with in this article; our hypothesis includes the application of Blending Theory (BT) to outline the cognitive processes that sustain the conceptualisation of fictive narrative. Our article attempts to propose a model stemming from cognitive theories of language, that accounts for the underlying cognitive processes that constitute the complex meaning construction when dealing with fictive narrative.