It has been just over a hundred years since a commentator identified "a peculiar phase" of the novel's history, a more or less eighteenth-century phase during which many novelists in both France and England pretended their novels were literally true. 1 Peculiar would seem the right word. The assertions, after all, rarely added up to an attempt to perpetrate an actual hoax; from what we can tell from the sketchy reception evidence, readers didn't seem to believe claims of truth; and hadn't

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... tle already taught that the essence of poetry is the possible rather than the true? Why did the novelists bother? And why did they at some point stop pretending, apparently feeling that it was of no import that novels be literally true? Behind this lurks a larger question that surely must be intriguing for anyone interested in literature: does fictionality itself, and not just the novel, have a history? These questions have already been asked -and answered -by literary historians, including myself. But the answers proposed are invariably ill-informed, because we usually don't know what we are talking about. "Many novelists pretended," I just said, with typical literaryhistorical hedging. How many? And how many didn't? "At some point" they stopped: when, exactly? and all at once, gradually ...? We don't know, and much worse, we don't realize that we don't know, because historians of the novel are content to argue by example -usually the few examples furnished by the literary canon, occasionally marginalized or forgotten examples, but examples whose representativity is never questioned. There are some classic methodological