A Possible World Approach to Modality in Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’

Abstract

1. Introduction:
Fictional worlds may possess complex modal structures, in which an ‘actual’ domain is surrounded by a number of alternative subworlds corresponding to the characters’ beliefs, wishes, moral obligations, dreams, hypotheses, fantasies and so on. Such unrealized alternatives to the actual domain can be related to the systems of epistemic, deontic, axiological and alethic modality (Dolezel, 1976 & Ryan, 1985, 1991). Generally speaking, poetry has not been receiving due attention within possible-world approaches to the study of fiction. Poems do tend to be mentioned among the types of texts that fall within the scope of a possible-world semantics of fictionality (e.g. Dolezel, 1989: 235-6 & Maitre 1983: 10), but they are rarely selected as the object of analysis. The main reason for this sort of neglect can be identified in the closeness of the link between possible-worlds approaches to fiction and narrative analysis, which leads to attention being devoted to texts with a strong narrative element, such as stories and novels.