From Axess, a special issue on Reality Invades Fiction, including an editorial; and self-representational literature erases the boundaries between reality and fiction. Is reality being depicted or created? Instead of basing their identity on memory, today’s writers choose to construct new images of themselves; a strange sub-genre of 18th and 19th-century literature gave voices to objects. Critics have usually viewed this as the manifestation of a commodified world, but it may represent something deeper, springing from the philosophies of Locke and Burke, about the nature of property, and the inextricable mingling of the human self and the physical world; and the virtual world did not become the socially liberated universe that many people believed. At meeting places on the internet patterns of behaviour from the

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