ABSTRACT: The main concepts in Aristotle’s Poetics – poetry as the imitation of nature, verisimilitude, mythos as an orderly sequence of events, and ethos as a distinguishing feature of the dramatis personae – marked the boundary between literary practice and other forms of representation. The Renaissance grappled with a literary tradition one of whose essential elements was the marvellous. In his Discourses on the Art of Poetry and In Particular on the Heroic Poem, Torquato Tasso endeavours to find a meeting point between verisimilitude and the marvellous. The arguments he uses to demonstrate the possibility of reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable poles stress the aporetic basis of the poet’s fictio: on the one hand it means creating a convincingly realistic world, on the other it is mendacium dicere. The same aporia reappears in the Bildungsroman: is there an underlying order beneath the transformation of the protagonist’s life? In real life there is dissonance but, as K.Ph. Moritz says in Anton Reiser, in the biographical recreation of that life by means of literary narration, dissonance is transformed into harmony.

KEYWORDS: Mimesis, marvellous, fictio, T.Tasso, K.Ph. Moritz.