Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel

by Nicholas D. Paige

Fiction has become nearly synonymous with literature itself, as if Homer and Dante and Pynchon were all engaged in the same basic activity. But one difficulty with this view is simply that a literature trafficking in openly invented characters is a quite recent development. Novelists before the nineteenth century ceaselessly asserted that their novels were true stories, and before that, poets routinely took their basic plots and heroes from the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812243552
• ISBN13: 9780812243550
• Release Date: October 2011
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.1"