Rise Of Fiction Research Articles

Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Joseph Rezek (bio) Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States thomas koenigs Princeton University Press, 2021 336 pp. This book offers one of the most fascinating reinterpretations of the early US novel since Cathy Davidson's The Revolution and the Word (Oxford UP, 1986), published now almost forty years ago. Beginning where Davidson began, with the so-called first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), and armed with Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essay, "The Rise of Fictionality" (2006), Koenigs does the hard and necessary work of separating, for early Americanists, the genre of the novel from what he calls the multiple "logics of fictionality" of the early national and antebellum periods (18). The novel did indeed "rise to dominance in the United States" (3), Koenigs admits, but not steadily or inevitably, not according to English models, and not at all with a simple relationship to fiction. The early US novel has long puzzled critics for its nonobvious relationship to the steadier and more familiar genres coming out of eighteenth-century Britain or that eventually dominated nineteenth-century America. Rather than consider earlier fictions as failed novels or as immature fictional experiments, Koenigs wants to read them on their own terms. That has been done before, but not with the kind of deep attention Koenigs brings to discourses of fictionality. He argues, polemically, that it is anachronistic to call every long prose fiction of the early US a novel. "In the spirit of Virginia Jackson's work on the lyricization of Emily Dickinson's poems," Koenigs writes, Founded in Fiction considers "the novelization of American fiction: the normalizing process by which a host of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book-length prose fictions that figured their project in contradistinction to novels would come to be grouped together under the generic umbrella of 'the novel'" (16). Fictionality means many things in this book, but the most encompassing definition Koenigs gives is a "mode of address" that seeks after truth (rather than lies or fraud) but is "defined by its explicit or tacit acknowledgement of its fabricated nature" (23). This is close to Gallagher's definition of fictionality as a prose narrative that claims a "nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater referentiality" and a "special way of shaping [End Page 258] knowledge through the fabrication of particulars" ("The Rise of Fictionality," The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton UP, 2006, 342, 344). Whereas Gallagher's object is realism as it unfolded in England, Koenigs considers all modes and genres of truthful fabrication that operated in the early US. Another touchstone for Koenigs is Gerard Genette, who associated fictionality with literary autonomy. Founded in Fiction shows how some American writers, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, did arrive at the notion of fiction as a retreat from the world, but the book mainly tracks how fictionists before Hawthorne believed the mode was useful as a way to intervene in society. Koenigs tells the story of "individuals and movements that used different modalities of fiction for community building and social reform" (3). Early US novels do not resemble English realism, to be sure; but instead of explaining this as a lack of understanding, Founded in Fiction closely analyzes a series of choices American authors made as they shaped fictionality in their own context. These choices produce a variety of fictionalities that must be understood in relation to debates about fiction that swirled around novels and novel-writing in the US between 1780 and 1860. The first chapter opens with a wonderful declarative sentence: "The origins of the American novel do not correspond to the emergence of fiction in the United States" (27). What follows is the counterintuitive argument that we should read works like The Power of Sympathy and Charlotte Temple as nonfictional novels. This is different than merely saying these writers expressed an aversion to fiction, like so many did in the US at the time, or that they wrote "tales of truth" (42). More specifically, Koenigs argues that "these writers disavowed fictionality as the means...

Nobody's Gold: Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana and the Rise of Fictionality

Taking as a case study Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (1596), an account of Ralegh's search for gold in South America, this essay argues that European ventures in early America required a mode of speculative thinking and deployment of nonreferential truth claims that Catherine Gallagher identifies as the hallmarks of "novelistic fictionality." Early American exploration narratives such as Ralegh's, then, perform the "rise of fictionality" over a century before the eighteenth-century British novel takes shape. Ralegh's initial descriptions of El Dorado, which he inherits from second-and thirdhand accounts, would seem to reflect the tradition of "marvellous" New World travel writing that had been present in English literature since Thomas More's Utopia (1516), but as the narrative progresses, Ralegh's description of the Amazon region increasingly draws on financial and sexual metaphors of "credit" intended to make the expedition more imaginable for the reader, and in particular to solicit the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. In several key instances, Ralegh fails to offer proof that gold is present, but nonetheless entertains the existence of gold in Guiana as a way to understand interactions with South American Natives that would otherwise be inscrutable. As a result, Ralegh's descriptions of gold mines he claims to have discovered, and even the ostentatious idea of El Dorado that he inherited from other European accounts, become easier for the reader to accept as a potential future reality. The figure of the gold thus operates much like Gallagher's formulation of the fictional novelistic character, an ontological vacancy which allows the reader to appropriate "nobody's story" as their own.

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo (review)

Li Guo. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, .  pp. Hardcover $., ISBN : . Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction presents thorough research on and eloquent analyses of selected works of women’s tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes), voluminous fictional texts written and sometimes performed by women at elite houses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. This is Li Guo’s second monograph on this fascinating genre, following her Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China published by the same press in . Overlapping in their coverages of historical period, the two books adopt a similar structure: each core chapter focuses on one tanci novel and hence gives well-deserved attention to these lengthy works, the longest one composed of  chapters. Guo has shifted her critical lenses since . While in her first book she explores the rich interiority of women as writing subjects fantasizing about adventures beyond their inner chambers, she now brings out the “realist tenor” () in the tanci narratives, that is, in the representation of the domestic space as reconfigured by female characters to challenge and subvert gendered authority through maneuvering Confucian conceptions of female exemplarity, to formulate nonnormative gendered relations within the space traditionally defined as feminine, and to eventually transcend gendered social and cultural boundaries for their pursuit of self-hood through nation-state building. The book includes an introduction, a conclusion, and five core chapters each of which analyzes one tanci work. In “Introduction: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Women’s Literary Tanci,” Guo historicizes the writing of selected tanci texts and positions her study in the global discourse on the writing women tradition. All five texts were written in the social unrest either anticipating or resulting from the Taiping Rebellion (–), a radical religious revolt and a civil war that nearly ended the Qing government and forced at least two of the five featured tanci authors into a life of exile. Unlike the wartime poems written by their contemporary women poets to express their suffering and nostalgia, women’s tanci narrative, as Guo points out, requires the author to practice “authorial self-distancing in inscribing social realities onto the narrative tableau of tanci, : : : through stylized verses, historically framed Reviews©  by University of Hawai‘i Press narratives, character focalization, or transformed supernatural beings to voice ‘truth’” (p. ). This “fictional realism” sheds light on historical meanings in the “imaginaries of heroism, martyrdom, loyalty, and subjectivity” underneath the fantastic narratives and utopian visions in these tanci works. The other goal of her study, Guo emphasizes, is to discuss “the heritage of women’s tanci and its value in studies of gender, authorship, and global women’s writing traditions” (p. ). The concept of “spatialization as a strategy for reading the narrative” (p. ), which Guo draws from Susan Stanford Friedman’s synthesized understanding of Julia Kristeva’s notion of spatialization and of Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative chronotopes, promises a fertile approach to women’s tanci texts. As Guo elaborates in several pages, spatialization as a method of reading points the reader to the “dynamism and interrelations between the authorial narrator and her implied readership, between textual vivacity and intertextual visions” (p. ). Such imagined author–reader interactions can be seen in the recurrent authorial insertions in written tanci texts, at the beginning or the ending of individual chapters, for instance. As Guo evocatively put, these authorial insertions embody a “repetitive compulsion of narration that ultimately and inevitably gestures towards a broader realm of gendered consciousness that at once fuels the authorial desire of narration and awaits more effectual articulation” (p. ). “Womanly becoming” is another intriguing notion Guo borrows and applies to her current study most imaginatively and productively, connecting the female “characters’ travel, travail, and social growth in the fictional realm” to “the diachronic development of gender consciousness as articulated in an ongoing and distinctive narrative tradition” (p. ). This long and dense introduction was written with impressive theoretical rigor and exhaustive references to scholarship on women’s tanci in both English and Chinese languages, on the rise of fiction and that of feminist awareness and sentiments as a cross-cultural phenomenon in China and in...

Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages

This essay advances several overlapping claims about how to conceptualize fiction within the density of historical time. First, I show that fictionality is entangled with ideologies of disenchantment and secularization. There is a long tradition in the West of both distinguishing and deriving fictionality from categories of bad belief; within the framework of the secularization thesis, possessing fiction—which is to say, having the literary infrastructure for a "willing suspension of disbelief"—becomes the mark of an achieved secular modernity. That history suggests the need to reconsider, in turn, what Catherine Gallagher excludes from her well-known account in "The Rise of Fictionality." The present essay seeks to theorize fictionality otherwise, in a manner that is hermeneutic and comparative. To do so, the second section addresses the archive of medieval literature and advocates for a shift in analytic focus, away from contemporary theorizations of literature and toward literary practice. "Commonplaces" of fictionality—or the shared motifs, genres, and contexts for semantic unearnestness—offer one strategy for doing so. The essay's final section then contends that these arguments are related to an important trend in medieval studies, a trend of arguably anachronistic scholarship on topics like medieval disability and medieval race, which deploys modern constructs in nonmodern archives. On the model of such undertakings, a comparative poetics of fiction stands to pluralize the literary-critical concept by returning it to its volatile interface with language's capacity to depict what is nonactual and the reinventions that result.

Fictionality, Audiences, and Character

Fictionality, Audiences, and Character

The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality

The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality

The History of Secret Histories

The History of Secret Histories Brian Cowan (bio) Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell, editors The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017 xii + 282 pages; isbn: 9781107150461 Peter Burke Secret History and Historical Consciousness: From Renaissance to Romanticism brighton, u.k.: edward everett root, 2016 ix + 259 pages; isbn: 9781911204381 the history of "secret histories" is no longer much of a secret. The last two decades have seen a growing body of historical and literary scholarship devoted to detailing the growth and the significance of this particular genre. The history of secret histories appeals for many reasons. The secret history stands at the intersection of several different modes of fiction and nonfiction writing, and it became prominent at roughly the same time that other well-known genres emerged, especially the fictional novel and new forms of factual narratives that attended to the problems of proof needed to persuade readers they were "true." It appeared at the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between public and private worlds. If, for an earlier generation of scholars, this generic and epistemic uncertainty made these stories appear unsettling, not easily categorizable, and hence best dismissed as unreliable or confidently ignored as unimportant, they now fascinate scholars who are interested in exploring such liminal texts. Just as attention to the historical contexts in which literature was created and received has become largely uncontroversial in literary studies, a reciprocal awareness of the constructedness of historical narratives has allowed [End Page 121] historians to appreciate that the boundaries between fact and fiction are never clear-cut, especially before the "rise of fictionality" in the later eighteenth century.1 The recent publication of two collections of essays affords a window into the ways in which both literary and historical scholars have approached secret histories. Although such studies depend on the work of scholars from both fields, there are some striking differences between literary and historical approaches. While it might be an exaggeration to say that there are two distinct histories of the secret history, there seem to be at least two styles of writing about it. The first is literary, and this tradition is best exemplified by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's remarkably wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays, The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820. The second is political, and Peter Burke's Secret History and Historical Consciousness introduces some of the concerns of this style. An interest in the historical significance of the form is particularly prominent among political historians of early modern England and France. What was a secret history? Literary and political historians tend to have slightly different understandings of the term, and this may account for their distinct approaches. In Bullard and Carnell's volume, as in literary history more generally, it is treated as a particular form of historical storytelling anchored by notions of authorship, canon, and genre. These scholars trace the emergence and development of the secret history genre by studying the reception and adaptation of certain key texts. Although they disagree about precisely which texts are "key" to the canon, scholars who treat secret histories as literature generally take this approach. Perhaps paradoxically, literary accounts tend therefore to be more "historical," in the sense of being rooted in a particular place and time, than the studies produced by political historians. Thus Rebecca Bullard elsewhere defines the genre as "a polemical form of historiography that flourished during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth."2 By contrast, political historians of secret histories tend to see them as part of a certain style of political thinking, something akin to what Richard Hofstadter identified in the American context as a "paranoid style."3 This stylistic approach sees such stories as the product of a view of politics that is above all suspicious. Secret histories [End Page 122] are obsessed with duplicity and dedicated to unmasking the disguises adopted by political actors—not only the deceitful actions of those in government but also the ruses adopted by those seeking to undermine an established regime. They see people as naturally inclined to deception and tending to corruption. This view of human nature...

Eighteenth-century fiction and the reinvention of wonder

Introduction: Wonder and the Rise of Fiction 1. Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment 2. Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume 3. Suspending the Reader in Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto 4. Marvelous Tales of Wonders Performed, or rather, Not Performed in Baron Munchausen's Narrative 5. A Little Voyage of Discovery?: Fiction and the Pursuit of Knowledge Epilogue

“Nothing but Fiction”: Modern Chivalry , Fictionality, and the Political Public Sphere in the Early Republic

“Nothing but Fiction”Modern Chivalry, Fictionality, and the Political Public Sphere in the Early Republic Thomas Koenigs (bio) Over the past decade, fictionality has been at the center of new work in novel studies and novel theory. Exemplified by Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality,” recent scholarship on the history of fictionality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England has provided a means of reframing and rethinking the conventional narratives of the rise of the novel and the development of realist fiction.1 Yet the history of fictionality in early America has largely been ignored or casually dismissed. For example, Gallagher, noting the prevalence of “Founded in Fact” narratives in the early Republic, has declared that “[f]ictionality seems to have been but faintly understood in the infant United States” (345). Gallagher’s characterization of the early Republic, however, overlooks the significant body of early American fiction that emerged in dialectical relation to the early Republic’s famous antifictional discourse. Those American novelists who broke the taboo against fictionality did so with a sense that the mode provided distinct advantages for their novelistic projects. Responding to fiction’s critics in their texts and paratexts, these writers advanced sophisticated metafictional arguments for the value of fictionality within republican culture. This essay takes up one such fiction, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), which posits fiction as an ideal mode for carrying on political debate. Many early Americans, dedicated to the ideals of classical republicanism, saw the popularity of fiction as a sign of modern degeneration: for these critics, the rise of fiction in the United States reflected the young Republic’s distance from the virtuous republics of antiquity and served as a harbinger of its failure.2 Brackenridge, however, saw in fiction not a sign of modern corruption, but a genre uniquely suited to address the challenges of modern republicanism.3 In Modern Chivalry, he [End Page 301] argues that the suppositional reference of fiction and especially the suppositional personhood of fictional characters—what Gallagher refers to as their “nobodiness”—allow fiction to achieve a greater impersonality than other forms of discourse, giving it the potential to serve as a uniquely virtuous mode within republican print culture. Confronted with the rise of the partisan press and the intensifying of conflicts between competing regional and political groups, Modern Chivalry approaches the factious political discourse of the young Republic as a problem of genre. For Brackenridge, the genres most closely associated with classical republicanism were insufficient for the challenges of the modern republic. In his landmark reading of Modern Chivalry, Christopher Looby shows how Brackenridge lampoons the pretenses of the Ciceronian oratory that was closely identified with classical republicanism, presenting classical republicanism as an anachronistic and even quixotic political framework for the modern United States (Voicing, 203–65, esp. 236). Faced with the inadequacy of these older forms, Brackenridge posits fiction as an alternative to both antiquated modes of political oratory and the scurrilous, partisan attacks of contemporary periodical writing. Modern Chivalry presents the suppositional reference of fiction as a better way of creating truly impersonal discourse than the norms of anonymity that governed the political public sphere in early America, which Brackenridge regards as providing a screen for interested political action. Modern Chivalry complicates our current narratives of fiction’s development. Tracing the emergence of novelistic fictionality across the long eighteenth century, Gallagher has linked fictionality’s “rise” to its depoliticization, showing how suppositional reference came to serve as a sign of privacy, politeness, and distance from political scandal (Nobody 88–115). Responsive to the exigencies of republican culture, Brackenridge sought to reverse this very depoliticization, arguing for fiction’s value within the very realm of public, political struggle to which it was generally regarded as opposed. Modern Chivalry reveals that by the end of the eighteenth century, fictionality’s “rise” extended far beyond the limited cultural arena in which the mode had first emerged. But more than just pointing to a neglected chapter in the history of fiction, Brackenridge’s metageneric argument exposes the limits of the theoretical framework through which scholars have approached the early American public sphere. For the past twenty years, public sphere...

"Searching after the Splendid Nothing": Gothic Epistemology and the Rise of Fictionality

By investigating the rhetoric of enchantment, shame, and disillusionment evident in contemporary reviews of Radcliffe's fictions, my paper argues that the fictionality uniquely elicited by the late-eighteenth-century Gothic parallels the epistemology of speculative Enlightenment philosophy. In particular, Radcliffe's repetitive use of the "explained supernatural" illustrates and elevates the potency of affect in the absence of causal objects that justify such responses, and echoes the Humean paradigm that substitutes efficacity—the "force and vivacity" an object affects on the mind—for mimetic representation. Radcliffe's gothic texts demonstrate that fiction solicits belief, which contributes to and depends upon readerly absorption in the text, and resides in the effects produced within the mind rather than in a stable correspondence between the experience and the object of perception. Extrapolating from eighteenth-century philosophy, I argue that belief is susceptible to reflection, which—as Radcliffe's readers emphasize—shatters the pleasure of the illusion with a disappointingly naturalistic explanation. The impossibility of sustained belief in the face of disillusioning reflection separates the Gothic from the Romantic novel of manners and helps to explain the rapid disappearance of this rendition of gothic popularity.

Medieval narratives between history and fiction: from the centre to the periphery of Europe, c. 1100-1400

The of literary fiction in medieval Europe has been a hotly debated topic for at least two decades. Important progress has been made, but difficulties remain in finding a common ground among scholars from various disciplines and regions. The present volume seeks to clarify and broaden the subject in two ways: first by including a wide range of medieval narratives irrespective of their modern label and affiliation to certain disciplines; secondly, these studies extend the discussion beyond the canonical French and German romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by focusing mainly on texts in Greek, Latin, and Old Norse and by opting for a peripheral and a long-term view of the problem. The chapters take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to medieval France, then to the Scandinavian lands and from there to south-eastern Europe and Byzantium as the link back to the Greco-Roman world. This disposition also follows a spiral motion in time: from Antiquity to Late Antiquity and from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By broadening the linguistic as well as the geographical and chronological scope of the debate, the book shows that we should not think of one rise of fiction, but rather of a potential always imbued in, and related to, historical narratives and that a modern understanding of medieval fiction cannot afford to disregard non-fictional or non-vernacular writing.

Journalism and the novel: truth and fiction, 1700-2000

Introduction 1. Journalism and the rise of fiction, 1700-1875: Daniel Defoe to George Eliot 2. Literary realism and the fictions of the industrialized press, 1850-1915: Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser 3. Reporters-turned-novelists and the making of contemporary journalistic fiction, 1890-today: Rudyard Kipling to Joan Didion 4. The taint of journalistic literature and the stigma of the ink-stained wretch: Joel Chandler Harris to Dorothy Parker and beyond Epilogue: the future of journalistic fiction and the legacy of the journalist-literary figures Appendix: the major journalist-literary figures: their writings and positions in journalism.

Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 (review)

Reviewed by: Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 James H. Murphy Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910, by Timothy G. McMahon, pp. 336. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. $45 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). A survey after the 2008 Irish referendum that defeated the European Treaty of Lisbon found that three-quarters of those who voted "no" said that they believed that Ireland could renegotiate the treaty, a scenario that would require the European Union to bow to the wishes of one percent of its membership. Self-confidence—indeed, some might say self-importance in certain areas—is a noticeable Irish trait, and not least at times in Irish Studies where Irish cultural struggles can seem to take on a momentous significance. It is a significance attested to, moreover, by the vehemence of the manner in which these struggles were said to have been contested. Consider the period between 1890 and 1923, which saw the fall of Parnell; the Gaelic League; the cooperative movement; Sinn Féin; Irish Ireland; the Anglo-Irish literary revival; the rise of fiction by the Catholic intelligentsia; the Boer War and World War I: women's suffrage; the 1916 Rising; the war of independence; and the Irish Civil War. Enough conflict there, one might think, for a dozen nations. In the light of all this, Timothy G. McMahon's Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910 is a decidedly audacious book. Its author argues against a view that places greatest significance on the conflicts and controversies about the attempted revival of the Irish language that centered around the Gaelic League and its allied movements, in favor of a moderate and balanced assessment of its achievements and limitations. McMahon's book, thus, manages to seem both irenic and radical at the same time. Its interest is not so much in the ideology of Gaelicism as in its "popular phase." In addition, it is written in an accessible style, sometimes focusing on individual life studies such as that of Eoghan O'Growney, the author of seminal Irish-language instruction books. It traces his career from his early Irish-language [End Page 153] writing for the Tuam News to his successful revival of Irish-language studies at the Irish national seminary at Maynooth in the 1890s, in spite of his own poor abilities as a lecturer. Early on, Grand Opportunity presents substantial background social history and, as such, might well serve as an introduction to the period. In its closing chapters, it outlines with clarity and detail many of the activities and functions of the Gaelic League, such as the competitive cultural gatherings or feiseanna that culminated in the national Oireachtas, and the then-popular phenomenon of processions—particularly the Dublin language procession held annually between 1902 and 1913, which at its height drew more than 20,000 participants. These events tended to be more generally social than strictly Irish-language events, with "the number of entries [in a particular contest] in an inverse relationship with the sophistication of contestants' command of Gaelic." In other words, it was the competitions that required little command of the language that got the most entrants. If they did not much enhance the national proficiency in the Irish language at least the events "did provide a new note of social life in communities across Ireland." Ironically, the Gaelic League, because of its town-based structure, seems to have been least successful precisely in the rural Gaeltacht areas where spoken Irish was strongest. McMahon begins by adverting to the body of theorizing that has taken place in recent decades concerning the social origins of Irish nationalist discontent. Among them, of course, is "blocked mobility": the frustration of rising expectations of those in the lower middle class leading to nationalist or cultural nationalist commitment. He argues that some of this work has not been grounded in empirical research into, for example, the membership of the Gaelic League itself. He attempts to fill the gap by providing data on the membership both of officers and members of the League during the period of his study. He does not, however, fully press home his earlier critique...