Nicholas D. Paige. Before Fiction: The Anden Regime of Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 304. Before Fiction is an study of French and English novel in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--a period in which insist on truth-status of their works in order to effectuate moral and aesthetic goals that genre aimed to achieve. Placing himself in dialogue with studies on fictionality by Dorrit Cohn, Lennerd Davis, Barbara Foley, and Catherine Gallagher, Nicholas Paige argues against teleological interpretations that seek in early modern period seeds of our own modernity, in favor of an approach that emphasizes shifts in literary practices over time. By deliberately eschewing tendency to search for innovative masterpieces from rearview mirror of literary (36), Paige not only raises new questions about canonical works from French and English traditions but also presents methodological model for how we should analyze evolution of literary forms in first place. Paige subtends his argument by delineating three regimes of literary invention: Aristotelian, pseudofactual, and fictional (x). Drawing on distinction between history and poetry in Aristotle's Poetics, authors in first regime write works that transform stories of historical figures and events into coherent narratives by adding their own measure of poetic invention. Beginning roughly in 1670, writers begin to challenge Aristotelian regime by penning works that insist on their own authenticity. Paige calls this second regime pseudofactual, term he borrows from Foley's Telling Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Such works rely on an ambiguous pseudofactual pact in which novelists [...] pretend to offer their readers real documents ripped straight from history--found manuscripts, entrusted correspondence, true stories, and all rest (x). Only at turn of nineteenth century begin to write texts that are properly fictional--that is, novels that recount tales of characters and events that are pure authorial invention. Works from third regime paradoxically ask readers to accept fiction as model for reality. Paige points to this often-overlooked paradox of realism: Modern literature at its most splendidly realist is also removed from reality in way it had never been before (3). As may already be apparent, Paige's notion of literary regime refers neither to Michel Foucault's epistemes nor to Thomas Kuhn's paradigms but rather to a dominant practice, modifiable over time, that corresponds to what enough people want their literature to do (31). Central to Paige's own narrative is conviction that rise of fictionality corresponds not to shifts in human cognition (early modern Europeans were not incapable of discerning illusion from reality) but to shifts in novelistic practice: If Aristotelian critical tradition did not sanction use of invented heroes, this was not because they didn't have right 'mental equipment' but--much less dramatically--because they reasoned that heroes should be taken from (27). Understanding fiction as specific writing practice, rather than as cognitive ability, raises important questions about how, when, and why literary behavior changes. The place of fictional in evolution of literary morphology is map that must be charted with precision, and in navigating novel's territory in world fiction, Paige blends close readings with analyses of critical reception of each work by its public and beyond. Focusing on six case studies from the strange interregnum between Aristotelian poetics and modern (x), Paige demonstrates ways in which authors in his study--Lafayette, Subligny, Crebillon fils, Rousseau, Diderot, and Cazotte--experiment with conventions of pseudofactual. …