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The nineteenth- (and early twentieth- ) century author and critic Henry James had a very different approach to understanding and explaining fiction as it was to be understood in both a scholarly and an artistic sense. Fiction and its authors have to take themselves with a certain sense of seriousness of purpose, in James' view, but with this cam a certain detachment (James 1884). True fiction, or at least good fiction, has a definite sense of context in the wider world, and with this comes a certain removal of the author's importance -- the seriousness and historical trajectory of great works of fiction transport the fiction itself beyond the control of the author, making it a part of the entire cultural and social tapestry (James 1884).
In reality, the boundless array of texts and fragments that constitute the world's body of fiction realize their full creation and potential somewhere between these two extremes of authorial dependence and irrelevance. The author's intentions, and their subconscious and unavoidable tendencies and subjectivities, necessarily come into play in the creation of a fiction, but fiction is not limited to the simple sum total of these intentions and prejudices. It is also necessarily situated in the perspectives of those who encounter or read every piece of fiction, which includes the historical and cultural situations that...
At the same time, fiction has the power to force those who encounter it to challenge their notions about the world and the way they see it, and can add new perspectives and ways of seeing and analyzing the world, as well. Even this challenge comes in the context of the readers' previous understandings, however, so essentially fiction is a way to create a dialogue between perspectives and constraints, remaining unbound by any of them.
Fiction is ultimately a way to share ideas and perspectives, even if they aren't always precisely the same ideas and perspectives in the minds of the author and of the different readers. This is why great works, like the stories woven by Chaucer and Shakespeare, remain both relevant and revitalized in subsequent generations, including our own. Fiction is a means of stepping outside of one's own particular version of reality in order to incorporate someone else's imagined or heightened version of reality, providing both a means of escape and a means for introspection.
References
Booth, W. (1983). "The rhetoric of fiction." In the novel: an anthology of criticism and theory, 1900-2000 (2006), D. Hale, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
James, H. (1884). "The art of fiction." Accessed 27 May 2010. http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html
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