About the Editor:
Richard York was educated at Kettering Grammar School, Emmanuel College Cambridge, and University College London. Since 1969 he has been teaching French and European Studies at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, where he is now Professor of European Literature. He has previously published The Poems as Utterance, Strangers and Secrets, and The Rules of Time. He has been particularly interested in the language and form of literature and in the application of linguistics to literary study and has until now studied a variety of French, British, and other European authors. He teaches French language, history, and society and European literature and history.

The Extension of Life seeks to define the nature of fiction as it has been practiced by some major American authors. It is inspired by the feeling that fiction is puzzling: that it is strange that readers appreciate stories which both are the free invention of their authors and also owe much to the actual facts of the history and society that the readers know from their everyday lives. It seeks to illuminate this puzzle by reference to the substantial body of study of narrative form and of the status of fiction that has been produced in recent years.