Abstract

Literary practice is part of a family of social practices, including that of fictive story-telling, which can be characterized through their constitutive concepts and conventions. The concept of literature itself as well as the literary stance can be characterized and explained only with reference to this framework. The literary stance is an attitude made possible by the defining concepts and conventions of literary practice in the approach to a text. Only by using these concepts and conventions can the reader identify the features of a literary work construed as a literary work within the practice. This chapter looks at the concepts and conventions which define literary practice in order to explore the differences between the concepts of fiction and literature.