"She Wrote Peter Halkett": Fictive and Factive Devices in Olive Schreiner’s Letters and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland

The idea of ‘fictive devices’, from the work of Eakin (1985), concerns narrative devices which are deployed so as to make tellings or narratings ‘more telling’ in the colloquial sense, that is, more pointed and convincing. Such devices include neatening events and plot, re-working characterisation to fit actions and vice versa, denoting causality, and allocating or avoiding agency. They are not necessarily lies or deliberate misrepresentations, but more usually involve reorganisation and tidying so as to make ‘how it was’ more like ‘as it should have been’ in order to tell a good - in the sense of and interesting and convincing - story.