This chapter addresses problems in the philosophy of interpretation with regard to Latin authors. Its central question is what we mean by the ‘author’. The history of ‘persona’, the notion that the speaker in first-person literature and by extension the image of the author presented in any text is a ‘mask’, is explored for its theoretical and interpretive value, but also critiqued for the potential ethical and political issues it raises. The author should be considered not a window onto the life of the flesh-and-blood Roman, but rather as a construct arising in part, but only in part, from an initial human consciousness living in a specific historical place and time, then developed through a dynamic process of reception. The battle for the life and soul of the author is the story of interpretation, in which the question of the extent to which ‘original intention’ can or should be the goal of exegesis was one of the great controversies of the 20th century and remains a creatively unsolvable problem. I argue that there are certain kinds of readings which are rightly and explicitly situated outside the scope of ‘original intention’, of which I take feminist readings as exemplary.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

To round up and sharpen the critical dialogue of ancient Greek texts with modern narrative theory, the final chapter compares the ancient sense of narrative as explored in the course of this study with what we find in postmodern literature. At first sight, the similarities are striking: postmodern narratives challenge the distinction between fact and fiction, ignore the boundaries between narrative levels, play with character presentation and forgo motivation in psychological terms. However, whereas postmodern authors consciously undercut the conventions of modern realist novels, ancient authors follow their own, independent logic. The parallels between pre- and postmodern narratives belong to utterly different frameworks, which endow them with different significances. Cast as a challenge, postmodern texts remain fixated on modernism. Ancient texts, on the other hand, while having influenced the rise of the modern novel, are premised on their own distinct view of narrative.

That psychologists, among others, have sought to contain identity in one way or another stands to reason; it is important, at times, to get hold of what we can. It is equally important, however, to recognize and avow the existence of phenomena that resist this getting-hold and that therefore require something else, something better suited to the phenomena in question. In the case of identity, this something, I suggest, is literature, broadly conceived. In offering this perspective, I make no claims at all about the coherence or continuity of identity. Nor do I seek to specify what form of literature is required. Some identities may lend themselves to comparatively smooth beginning-middle-end tales; others, to more modern or post-modern forms; others still, perhaps, to the free verse of poetry. It all depends on the questions one asks, the person doing the questioning, and, not least, the history that precedes us, uncontainable and unnamable though it is. Whatever else identity may be, it remains something of a mystery. Rather than this being cause for despair, however, it is cause for celebration – quiet celebration, founded in the unending inspiration of what we do and cannot know about our own deepest strata.

This initial chapter establishes virtual play as a historical practice, and draws its parallel with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in novel fictionality. It introduces the concept of paracosmic play or worldplay – a form of modern make-believe documented in the juvenilia and biographical archives of Thomas De Quincey, Anna Jameson, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas Malkin, Charlotte Brontë, and Anthony Trollope – as the clearest manifestation of this practice. I review the social scientific work on this phenomenon, track its origins through the history of utopian fiction, and propose its formal significance and theoretical affinities to the nineteenth-century novel. This chapter frames and contextualises the historical argument of the book: that novel fiction comes of age by distinguishing the actual from the virtual.

A commonplace of French literary history holds that around 1660 an archaic novelistic form called the roman was suddenly replaced by the nouvelle, and that this replacement amounts to the birth of the novel in a modern sense. In this quantitative analysis, I tag of a sample of novels appearing between 1601 and 1730 for a variety of characteristics long said to distinguish romans from nouvelles (length, use of inset narratives, historical setting); I add the further variables of protagonist type (drawn from history or not) and truth posture (assertions of veracity and admissions of invention). Such analysis reveals that although romans do predominate in the first half of the century while nouvelles flourish in the second, 1660 cannot be confirmed as a threshold. In fact, far from being diametrically opposed, romans and nouvelles are in many respects merely different moments in the evolution of the same basic artifact, one to be eventually replaced by the first-person forms familiar from the eighteenth century. More broadly, a quantitative approach suggests that the novel’s history should be thought of less as a story of stability and rupture than as continual — but patterned — flux.

The introduction begins with a methodological critique of conventional “rise of the novel” narratives, in which individual, carefully chosen texts are taken as symptoms of underlying changes summed up by the word modernity. The potential benefits of quantitative sampling are then described and situated with respect to the computational text analysis more common in the Digital Humanities. Quantitative study reveals trends that can best be understood through an approach adapted from Science and Technology Studies, where new artifacts are the result of an interplay between human values and the material constraints placed on human actors by extant artifacts. The basic problem of the novel’s so-called fictionalization over the course of the eighteenth century is then shown to be bound up with subject matter (notably the use of “nobody” protagonists) and more properly formal issues (involving especially first-person narratives).

This chapter presents data on the English novel from 1701 to 1810. Many of the trends in the French novel are shown to be repeated in England, although sometimes on a different timetable. Among the starker differences are a much more rapid decline of pseudofactuality and a more sudden and stronger uptake of the polyphonic epistolary novel. Data also suggest that these differences may be plausibly explained by the fact that the small production of English novels prior to 1750 made for an extremely unstable—and thus more easily modified—novel system.

This chapter examines a type of novel that spreads in the second half of the eighteenth century as the first-person document novel declines. This is a third-person novel that can be shown to be formally distinct from the romans and nouvelles popular before the take-over of document novels. It is characterized notably by its segmentation into chapters and by its use of opening scenes (as distinct from the biographical character sketch). The chapter further shows that while the spread of this form roughly correlates with the “fictionalization” of the novel observed in Chapter 1, truth posture and form are nonetheless independent variables. The new third-person novel was not inherently fictional; rather, it arose only after the value long accorded to literal truth had receded.

This chapter describes in more detail the truth pretense characterizing the eighteenth-century novel, and summarizes the theories that have been advanced to explain it. It then lays out a series of classificatory tags capable of covering all truth postures of the period (broadly, the Aristotelian, the pseudofactual, and the invented). The balance of the chapter presents the data, showing that the decline in the truth posture over the years 1681-1830, while indisputable, does not match what one would expect if previous explanations were valid.

Quantitative data do not support previous accounts of the novel's rise. The record shows no moments of rupture, but instead a constant formal churning. Because that churning is pattered, we may speak of the novel as in fact a system of artifacts. Appropriating the insights of Science and Technology Studies and especially the theory of technological evolution developed by W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology, ), this chapter elaborates a technological model for understanding the evolution of the system, which takes place both on the level of the system as a whole and on that of the artifacts that compose it. Arthur's concept of “redomaining” — the achievement of a given purpose with a different technology — is particularly important for understanding the long delay needed for the spread of document novels, whose technology was discontinuous with respect to that of previous novels composing the system. Finally, the chapter suggests that fictionalization was part of a longue durée development of narrative postures less and less skeuomorphic with respect to oral narrative models, and more aligned with print transmission.