At the level of genre, fiction and reality find their respective equivalents
in the novel and the newspaper. Fiction as genre meets its opposite in reality as
genre, that is, in nonfiction. And yet the novel and the newspaper are the two genres
in which nations imagine themselves, according to Benedict Anderson’s theory of
nationalism. For Anderson, the novel and the newspaper narrate worlds readers can
easily locate in the extratextual world. Yet this world is itself partly created by the
two genres. Using shifters such as we and today, the genres designate their own
reception, which depends on their circulation: the nation is comprised of whoever
uptakes the shifters. These shifters, however, not the two genres as such, are sharing
the fate of nationalism in post-nationalist times.

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• Novel fiction, newspaper reality