 The label “imaginative resistance” is given to the phenomenon for the first time in 1994 by Richard Moran, in his article “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination”. It is this article by Moran, as well as Kendall Walton’s article from the same year, “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality”, that have ignited the interest in imaginative resistance. These articles respectively grow out of Moran’s talk at the 1992 American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting—then titled “Art, Imagination, and Resistance”—and Walton’s commentary on Moran’s talk. Moran’s main aim in “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination” is to criticize Walton’s account of fictional emotions and more specifically what Moran perceives as a discontinuity in the account between the uses of imagination in our real-life engagements and in our engagements with fictional works. In doing so, he discusses a special phenomenon—he dubs it “imaginative resistance”—that, he believes, helps him to problematize Walton’s account. Walton himself mentions the phenomenon in his 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe and describes it as a curious psychological reluctance to allow fictional worlds to differ from the actual world in certain moral aspects (see Walton 1990: 154–5). However, this is not the first time this phenomenon is discussed in philosophical aesthetics. 