Fictionistity In Catherine Gallagher's The Rise Of Fictionality

In her article “The Rise of Fictionality”, literary critic Catherine Gallagher sources an etymological modification of the term ‘fiction’ with the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century England, where it emerged as “a supposition known to be at variance with fact, but conventionally accepted” (347). This occurred at a time when an extensive homology between the ubiquitous use of speculation in modern society and that of belief that operates in the novel arose. The former required “the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction” (347). Through its frequent application and encounter, the “readers developed the ability to tell [fiction] apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception” (338). Its “earlier meaning of “deceit, dissimulation, pretence” became obsolete” (338). This paper will identify the effect of the synchronously burgeoning field of psychology, and its use of speculations and hypotheses in studying the mind, on this modification of fiction’s meaning, and its consequent influence on the formal and the thematic structure of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. While it does not assume a unidirectional, causal alliance between the two, for the scope of this paper more attention will be paid on how the novel was configured in its scientific environment. This will be

Undertakings from courtship to commerce, Gallagher writes, could not be carried “without some degree of imaginative play” (346). The institution of natural science consisted of a symbolic universe superimposed upon the technical universe in which a repertoire of abstract categories was methodically speculated upon. Unalike its subsequent modes of inquiry, the emerging discipline of psychology, for example, held the metaphysical materialist supposition in abeyance and rather rendered “immaterial substances as a (putative) object of empirical study” (Hatfield