Non-Fictional Discourses and the Novel

This chapter looks at how readers of eighteenth-century British fiction seem to have possessed less carefully policed divisions between fact and fiction. It speculates that their credulity was more flexible than that of current critics and readers. Into the 1750s and beyond, many narratives that were obviously fictional featured titles or subtitles that gestured toward the kind of factuality to be found in such ‘news’: fiction that was somehow truthful or claimed a kind of non-literal truth. The chapter notes that, from antiquity onwards historians were ignorant of many things. And of course the classical tradition of historical writing allowed or indeed encouraged invented speeches and concocted descriptions.