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Abstract

Abstract During the last 30 years, talking about worlds in narratology has been largely based on the terminology and presuppositions of Possible Worlds-Theory (PWT). This branch of research originally developed out of analytical philosophy’s modal logic, and it treats the content of narrative fiction as entities that inhabit a world of their own. In recent years, some of PWTʼs major goals - like proposing a general theory of fictionality - have repeatedly become the object of criticism. Prior to this, PWT already had to deal with the problems that came up when texts were considered worlds. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to examine and illuminate general problems of PWT, some of which have not been broadly recognized. Second, it reconsiders Umberto Ecoʼs Lector in Fabula as an earlier but forgotten methodological attempt to describe world structures in narrative fiction. Ultimately it can be shown that a significant proportion of PWTʼs shortcomings, emphasized in the first part, could be compensated by a partial return to a textpragmatic model such as Ecoʼs.