Introduction: Interstitial Fiction

W hat kind of a “thing,” if anything, is Renaissance fiction? How do artificial creations exist in relation to the real world? How ought we conceptualize the ontological status of a myth, an allegory, a hypothesis, or a thought experiment? And by asking these questions of Renaissance fiction, those fabricated spaces of verse and prose, do we imply that such an answer could possibly be historicized? That is, might Renaissance fiction be—not only formally but also ontologically speaking—a different sort of a thing from the fictions of other eras? Most attempts to approach these questions theorize the fictional by first delineating what fiction is not. For example: it is not real (that’s Plato), it is not of this world (that’s Ernst Cassirer), and it is not a lie (that’s Sir Philip Sidney).Discussing the eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher proffers that early British novelists “imprisoned and concealed fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible,” arguing that fiction’s novelistic form grew out of the “widespread acceptance of verisimilitude as a form of truth, rather than a form of lying.” But for Harry Berger, true fiction’s