In Poiesis and Possible Worlds, Thomas L. Martin makes a highly focused intervention in the debate about poststructuralist and postmodern theorizing and offers a philosophical approach to some of the controversial tenets of recent theorists. The result is an important addition to the existing literature on the usefulness of possible worlds theory for literature.

Martin argues that literary studies remain mired in the anomalies of a linguistic methodology derived from early twentieth-century language philosophy, a view challenged not only by theoretical physics, but also by...