Reader Expectations Quotes

“On the most fundamental level, all fiction rests on the unwritten statement, 'This is fiction.' The reader is, traditionally, asked to ignore that knowledge, but the reader needs to have it, nevertheless; otherwise, everything that follows would be an act of miscommunication. *In the last century and in this one, an increasing number of writers as diverse as John Barth, Tim O'Brien, and David Shields have made that very issue the subject of their work. Such writing rests heavily on the awareness that we bring different expectations and assumptions to prose that calls itself 'fiction.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer