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Suspension of disbelief
Allowing imagination when reading or viewing a fictional story / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Suspension of disbelief is the avoidance—often described as willing—of critical thinking and logic in understanding something that is unreal or impossible in reality, such as something in a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoying its narrative.[1] Historically, the concept originates in the Greco-Roman principles of theatre, wherein the audience ignores the unreality of fiction to experience catharsis from the actions and experiences of characters.[2]
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The phrase was coined and elaborated upon by the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1817 work Biographia Literaria: "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith".[3]