In English, fiction serves to designate narrative texts; in an extended usage, it is also understood to include other artistic and creative media such as film, theater, comics, or video games. However, conceptualizations of narrativity and fiction are not interchangeable, because narratology investigates the structures of texts (and other media), whereas for theories of fiction the focus is on truth or validity claims (Ryan 2007, 32–33).

Terminologically, the terms fictional and fictive can be used with Wolf Schmid in such a way that fictionality refers to the status of the text, while fictiveness refers to what is depicted within a fictional text ("A novel is fictional, the world it portrays fictive"; Schmid 2010, 21). Fictionality then corresponds as a counter term to the factual, and the fictive in turn to the real. Texts such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid are, in this sense, fictional texts and the objects narrated in them are fictive objects, while legal texts are factual and the associated objects such as place and time are real. But what makes a text a fictional text? Are there, as Käthe Hamburger and others postulate, text-internal markers that establish a fictional text status? Or is it a matter of a pretended speech act in the sense of John Searle, who denies the existence of text-internal markers ("[there is] no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction," 1975, 325). If one follows Searle, the fictional text status is determined solely by text-external communication conditions. The theses of Searle, but also of other theorists such as Iser, show points of contact with constructions of an 'as-if', as known from Hans Vaihinger's philosophy. Fictionality becomes relevant, among other things, in such genres and texts that allow multiple interpretations, such as Pliny the Younger's epistolary correspondence, which has been taken to be both factual as 'real' communication and fictional in the sense of pure book literature.

The Possible Worlds Theory (PWT) has given additional impetus to the debates on fictionality since the 1970s. Originating in analytical philosophy (Rudolf Carnap, Saul Kripke), the model has been applied to the analysis of narrative texts by David Lewis, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel, Uri Margolin, Ruth Ronen, Marie-Laure Ryan, and others. PWT theory is of interest in part because it shifts the question of 'truth value' from the boundary between the fictional and non-fictional world (borders of fiction) and instead relocates it within the fictional world itself. What about the desires, dreams, hopes, and fears of characters, one might ask, that are not realized within a narrated world in relation to what 'actually' happens in the narrated world? The model has found application especially for the novels of modernity (Gutenberg 2000 on novels such as Doris Lessing's The Summer before the Dark), but it is equally relevant for the analysis of ancient texts such as Ovid's Tristia, in which the wishful thinking of the poet's exiled self 'Ovid' transports him to the urbs Roma, which is forbidden to him.

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