Fabulation

In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. As M. H. Abrams wrote,

[Such novels] violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly successful—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

Fabulating authors include Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Ishmael Reed.

Further reading

• Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (1967); also expanded upon in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979).
• James M. Mellard, The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (1980).
• Bordeleau, Erik, Toni Pape, Ronald Rose-Antoinette and Adam Szymanski. Nocturnal Fabulations: Ecology, Vitality and Opacity in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Open Humanities Press (2017).