Benedict S. Robinson specializes in early modern literature, with interests that include the history of emotion, the history of literary theory, the history of science, and topics related to race and religion. His most recent book is Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind (Oxford University Press, Spring 2021). 

ABSTRACT: This talk aims to explode a thesis about “the rise of fictionality,” argued most famously in an essay of that title by Catherine Gallagher. I also have in mind related claims—by Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Mary Poovey, Nicholas Paige—that the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century first distinguished fiction from non-fiction, or first differentiated “literature” from other modes of discourse. I trace the widespread availability of a concept of fictionality in literary theory, rhetoric, and logic from late antiquity on, and I trace its broad dissemination in the materials of grammar school education in the early modern period. But more importantly, I aim to reconfigure the social purchase of fictionality as Gallagher accounts for it. She understands fictionality in relation to the development of credit markets: fictionality means setting aside “the literal truth of a representation” in order to “admire its likelihood,” a practice she sees as akin to the act of “extending credit.” Leaving aside the fact that the history of credit is longer than the history of the modern novel, I argue that this account is far too narrow in its construction of the social bases of credible fiction. I end by discussing the operations of credit and fictionality in Shakespeare’s Othello, showing how that play locates the issue of who can and who cannot be believed—who is and who is not credit-worthy—in the fraught context of divisions of race and gender. Fictionality is not only an available concept in Shakespeare, but a crucial term for the analysis of social life. It has an urgent relationship to the means by which social life is constituted—and destroyed.

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called 'Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms' (2019). She is author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (U Penn 2023), which traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. Most recently, she has published, “Ecocriticism and the Geographies of Race” in The Sundial. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections.

During this workshop, Joe Black, Professor of English, UMass Amherst, will introduce participants to the book making process and offer a short lesson in collation focusing on Shakespeare's First Folio. Pairs of attendees will work with one of the bound First Folio extracts. Our goal will be to determine, from the collective collations available in the room, what they tell us about how much of the First Folio we have in the room that day.