* Work on this chapter has been financially supported by LCE - Literature, Cognition and Emotions (FPIII at Humanities Faculty, University of Oslo). Some of the arguments made in this contribution form part of my habilitation treatise at Giessen University (title The Cultural and Cognitive Work of Autofiction: Forms, Affordances, and Effects from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-First) and are published in similar form in A History of Autofiction: Cognitive and Cultural Work from 18th-Century England to Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures, Bloomsbury Academic 2025). 1 Goodreads is an Amazon-owned social cataloging and reviewing site (launched in January 2007), on which mostly lay readers publicly rate and comment on books, compile reading lists, and engage in discussions. Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom Alexandra Effe 1 Introduction The contemporary publishing landscape is full of texts in which life and art are difficult to pry apart. Texts that somehow present a portrait of their author but are also clearly fictionalised fill bookshops, university reading lists, and Goodreads  1 shelves. They are discussed in academic articles, international re‐ viewing organs, on social media, and by the popular press. Prominent examples that have received much critical attention and also become major publishing successes include Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp (My Struggle) series, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. These three works already make apparent that the respective authors are present, and fictionalised, in these texts to very different degrees. Cusk’s books all feature the same author-character, once in each book identified as Faye. She functions as narrator, but is present mostly as a conversation partner for the stories of others, whose selves take up this book in the main. Ferrante publishes a four-part story of the writer-character Elena/ Lenú, who shares a given name with the author. The textinternal author, Elena Greco, tells of her life from early childhood to finding her profession, and also mentions that she is writing an autobiographical novel. The fact that ‘Elena Ferrante’ is a pseudonym adds an additional layer of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 ambiguity to the question of how author and character are linked. Knausgård, lastly, offers a multi-volume life account that seems to be transparently that of the author, but with several of his family members appearing under different names, and with the author exhibiting scarily detailed memory of conversations, clothing, and food cooked, but also at times reflecting on the fact that such detailed recall is realistically impossible. These kinds of hybrid autobiographical-fictional books are often discussed under the moniker autofiction, a contested term popularised in the 1970s by writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky (who used it on the back-cover of his book Fils). The term is flawed, and there is no shortage of criticism of it. To name just two important issues, for one, the elements of auto and fiction - if we take them to refer to the self and also to something novelistic, something fictionally shaped, perhaps something invented, are in combination found in most literary texts, maybe in all. Secondly, Doubrovsky coined the term as a modification of autobiography, but, in wanting to replace the biography part with the fiction part, unfortunately lost also the bio(life)and the graphe(writing)-parts of autobiography. This chapter will not go into additional problems that the term entails, foregrounding instead its wide use. Despite its flaws, many theorists, critics, and readers seem to feel that the various kinds of texts they group under the label autofiction have something in common, and that the term gets at something specific that would be lost if one were to use descriptors like fiction, novel, autobiography, or memoir. Autofiction is applied with most consensus to texts that, in classically post‐ modern fashion, include extensive metafictional commentary, in particular about the act of writing, and about how the self is transformed through acts of writing, sometimes also of reading. The process is at times conceived of as performative self-creation, at others as falsification, and in many cases as a bit of both. One might exemplarily think of Philip Roth’s oeuvre, in which we find multiple alter egos and extensive commentary on cross-transfers between life and art. In Operation Shylock, for instance, one alter ego finds another, who is posing as Philip Roth; and in The Facts, the alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, questions an autobiographical account written by a textinternal Philip Roth. The term has at times been used also for texts avant-la-lêttre, but diachronic perspectives on autofiction are still rare (see Effe and Lawlor 2025). The fact that autofiction is mostly discussed as a postmodern and contemporary phenomenon is the starting point for this chapter. It proposes to extend autofiction as term and concept diachronically, which, as the chapter demonstrates, brings new insights into the emergence and development of autofictional modes, and into the socio-historical and literary contexts in which we find them. This 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 130 Alexandra Effe approach engenders new readings of texts not previously considered for their autofictional dimension and serves to historicize the contemporary boom. In what follows, the focus is on the early eighteenth century, and specifically, on one of the arguably earliest autofictional texts in English literature: Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella, the first edition of which appeared in 1714. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of the difficulty of defining what autofiction is, or what it should most usefully denote. This definitional challenge is taken as impetus for advocating a more holistic and cognitive approach that, so this chapter’s claim, allows us to better see and understand autofictional texts, especially in earlier periods. At the example of the eighteenth-century so‐ cio-cultural and literary landscape, and through analysis of Rivella, the chapter then shows that existing accounts of the period - focusing usually on a transition from pseudofactual to fictional texts - have failed to acknowledge the existence of autofictional modes. Textual close reading underpinned by cognitive theory and attention to context of production and reception redresses this oversight. It helps better understand Manley’s text, the workings of autofiction more generally, as well as generic developments of the eighteenth century. The new approach to autofiction advocated and demonstrated in this chapter moreover points to a number of important current themes and new trajectories in literary and cultural studies, which are charted in the conclusion. 2 A Cognitive-Holistic Approach In discussing autofictional practices, one, as Stefan Iversen (2020: 556) notes, grapples with “a type of narrative transgression that, on the one hand, is fairly easy to recognise yet, on the other, very hard to precisely pin down.” The examples mentioned above show how diverse texts we might discuss as autofiction are, and how difficult it is to find a clear definition. We run into trouble, for example, if we try to base a definition on onomastic correspondence or a lack thereof; author and character share a name in Knausgård’s My Struggle, but not in Cusk’s trilogy, only the given name in Ferrante’s quartet, and, in Roth’s oeuvre, some alter egos are called Philip, Philip Roth, or some derivation of the name, while others, Nathan Zuckerman, for instance, are not. Paratextual material does not help either. Many of the texts mentioned so far are labelled ‘a novel,’ but readers are clearly not meant to read them exclusively as such. Genre labels can moreover be used ironically, and, especially in earlier periods, texts are frequently published without such designators. Whether there is metafictional commentary or not cannot be a defining criterion either; we find such elements prominently in Roth’s work, but much less strongly in Cusk’s, Ferrante’s, and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 131 2 I make this argument also together with Hannie Lawlor in a volume on The Autofic‐ tional, in which the move from noun to adjective allows discussing autofictional elements also in other media and to extend the concept more globally (see Effe and Lawlor 2022). 3 Lejeune’s famous concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ establishes as central for autobiography the author’s promise to tell their story as truthfully as possible (see Lejeune (1973) for the original publication; see 1986, 1989, and 2005 for translations and for his own reconsiderations of his account). 4 For a similar advocacy, albeit discussing exclusively contemporary autofiction see Effe and Gibbons (2022). For a more developed cognitive-holistic and diachronic approach, mapping A History of Autofiction from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, see Effe (2025) (chapter 5 discusses Manley’s Rivella in an expansion of the argument presented in this chapter). Knausgård’s. While this chapter’s focus is not on terminological issues, as part of its interest in a diachronic consideration of autofiction, it argues for a move from the noun to the adjective. Understood adjectivally, autofictional can denote a quality of texts, particular elements within a text, and a quality of writing and reading modes. 2 Autofictional elements and qualities are at least as difficult to pin down, however, as autofiction as a genre. This is so, since neither semantic, nor syntactic, or pragmatic criteria are sufficient for defining a text as autofictional. Neither purely textual criteria, in other words, nor the author’s intention alone, nor purely the reader’s stance, can determine whether a text is autofictional. This chapter demonstrates that the slipperiness of autofiction requires con‐ sideration of textual and paratextual signals together with authorial intention and reading experience. We moreover need to see each text in its particular socio-historical context of production and reception. Autobiography, as Rachel McLennan stresses, is transactual (rather than contractual, as Lejeune would have it). 3 “Crucial to the production and reception of autobiography,” she writes, “are relations of exchange (give and take) between writer and reader” (2013: 112). The same holds for autofiction, and arguably to a heightened degree, since many autofictional texts are centrally about negotiating genre expectations. The text, and also paratextual elements, are the medium via which these transactions and negotiations are conducted, and we need to see text and paratext in combination with actors on each side to understand the phenomenon of autofiction. An approach that is holistic in this sense is already also a cognitive one since it looks at how texts originate in their author’s minds, how they exert effects on the minds of authors and readers, and, in so doing, on their socio-historical and literary context. A cognitive-holistic approach 4 allows exploring potential and actual effects of autofictional modes in a particular socio-historical and personal situation. We can speculate about motivations on the part of the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 132 Alexandra Effe author on the basis of what we know about their biography, and also by drawing on self-commentary, manuscripts, letters, and diaries. How texts act on a readership can be traced through reviews and be hypothesised on the basis of what cognitively inflected theories of discourse processing tell us about likely responses to specific textual prompts. The latter is what this chapter relies on to better understand how Manley’s text worked in its initial context of publication. In drawing on cognitive theory to understand textual effects in diachronic perspective, it is important to keep in mind that conventions of reading and perhaps even our cognitive capacities change over time. Nonetheless, together with consideration of a given period’s generic conventions, socio-historical, socio-cultural, and media context, theories about twenty-first-century readers, at times also based on empirical studies, make cognitive approaches possible also diachronically. 3 Delarivier Manley’s Rivella and Eighteenth-Century Generic Hybridity When Doubrovsky, as he thought himself, coined the term autofiction in the 1970s, he stressed that the practice was not new. As he writes, “si j’ai forgé le mot je n’ai pas inventé la chose” (1994: 72). While it is generally acknowledged that autofiction before Doubrovsky exists, few critics discuss examples before modernism. In the remainder of this chapter, an exploration of autofictional modes in eighteenth-century England illustrates that the term and concept can productively be extended much further diachronically, and that for doing so the cognitive and holistic approach described above is particularly fruitful. The eighteenth century is the time when the modern concept of the author emerges and when copyright is introduced as publishing structures change from patronage to marketplace system. Authors hence newly need to market themselves and their books. The early eighteenth century, in particular, is moreover a time of generic uncertainty. The written word is important for informing people about what is happening in the world, but the kinds of texts people draw on are diverse, and invented elements are common. Lennard J. Davis (1996 [1983]: x) uses the phrase “news/ novels discourse” to describe this fluidity of factual and fictional forms. He refers to the predominant attitude at the time as “cultural indifference to fact and fiction in narrative” (100). By the end of the century, we have a much clearer differentiation of fictional and factual modes of writing, which is why many critics situate the beginnings of the English novel in this period, or at least the beginnings of the prototype that dominates the nineteenth century. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 133 For understanding the workings of autofictional modes in the generically hybrid landscape of the eighteenth century, we will draw on three influential accounts of this transitional period. The first comes from Barbara Foley, who coins the term ‘pseudofactual novel’ for a textual form of importance in particular during the first half of the century. She uses the term to refer to stories that are invented but presented as consisting of, or as based on, actual diaries, letters, or memoirs composed by the protagonist. Pseudofactual novels, according to Foley (1986: 108), invoke “an intrinsically ironic, even parodic contract,” asking readers to accept that characters and events are invented but to simultaneously approach the text as if it were nonfictional, for instance a real diary. Foley believes that this ironic posture is initially adopted to allow writers to “be taken seriously as interpreters of social reality” (115), and to distinguish their work from what was at the time the most widely acknowledged genre of prose fiction, namely the romance. The pseudofactual posture eventually gives way, in her account, to “unabashedly fictional” texts, in which writers assert truth through “analogous configuration” (144). The pseudofactual stance, in other words, is a stage in the novel’s development towards the prototype of nineteenth-century realism. Catharine Gallagher approaches the same transition with a slightly different focus. She foregrounds who stories claim to be about, which, so she argues, changes from accounts about (allegedly) real people to stories about invented and therefore unknown ones. The former means to adopt a pseudofactual stance, for which she lists writers like Defoe or Manley as examples. These, she explains, assume “correspondence between a proper name in a believable narrative and an embodied individual in the world” (2006: 342). The reference, Gallagher notes, can be allegorical (as in Robinson Crusoe) or covert (as in Manley’s works), but pseudofactual pretence is for her a “serious [attempt] to convince readers” that “invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people” (337). In contrast, to present a story as invented and as about unknown people is what for her defines a fictional stance. Here, texts are presented as offering generalised truths by way of an “explicitly nonreferential, fictional individual,” a “nobody” (337). In her account a cluster of mid-century novelists quite suddenly abandon pseudofactual pretence, which is why she speaks of a “discovery of fiction” (341). She admits that the practice of fiction is not entirely new, but stresses that authors before did not consciously and explicitly tell general truths through invented protagonists. Nicholas Paige, in describing the change from pseudofactual to fictional modes as a change in aesthetic values, offers a particularly helpful angle for understanding how autofictional modes relate to pseudofactual and fictional 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 134 Alexandra Effe ones. He identifies a change in aesthetic values in two stages (see 2011: 26). First, there is a transition from valuing tales of heroes, which are appreciated because these are by nature interesting, exemplary, entertaining, and instructive (the Aristotelian regime), to valuing tales about ostensibly historical contemporaries and real documents. The (allegedly) historical is appreciated because real people and events are believed to more strongly move readers, which in turn is believed both to help improve them and to please them (the pseudofactual regime). The subsequent change is to valuing straightforward and explicit invention. It is appreciated for providing the basis of a kind of simulation that grounds emotional effects, and because it is believed to convey general, abstract, and analogical truths about the world (the fictional regime). The second transition - from the pseudofactual to the fictional regime - is what Paige, as do Gallagher and Foley, describes as taking place over the long eighteenth century, even though Paige stresses, in distinction to Gallagher and Foley, that the development is neither linear nor conceptual, but a slow change in tastes over a lengthy period. Autofictional modes are easily mistaken for pseudofactual or fictional ones in the eighteenth-century landscape since they share formal features and elements of communicative stance. That no one has, as of yet, discussed eighteenth-century hybrid life writing texts as autofictional is therefore not particularly surprising. Foley (1986: 186), for example, differentiates between the eighteenth-century pseudofactual novel and what she refers to as “the fictional autobiography” - a term she uses for texts that one might also refer to as autofictional. Both the pseudofactual novel and the fictional autobiography are for her instantiations of a category she calls documentary novel. The fictional autobiography is, in her account, a “new guise” for the documentary novel, appearing only in the twentieth century. She explains the differences by way of two examples: Robinson Crusoe and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Both texts have the appearance of an autobiography - a first-person narrator, named in the title, tells of their life. Robinson Crusoe in pseudofactual fashion wants readers to believe, or at least to join the pretence, that the book is written by Crusoe himself rather than by Daniel Defoe. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in contrast, lets readers in on the joke that what according to the title is an autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and what appears to be told in her first-person voice, is actually written by, and primarily also about, Gertrude Stein. In this lies the main difference, defining one as a pseudofactual text and the other as a fictional-autobiographical hybrid, also for Foley: “Defoe did not, after all, admit to having composed his pseudomemoir,” she stresses; “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is, by contrast, undisguisedly by Gertrude Stein” (190). What Stein 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 135 5 The phrase stems from the subtitle of Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story (1994). does is not something entirely new emerging only in the twentieth century, however. Autofictional texts existed before, as this chapter will show. Gallagher, too, overlooks autofictional modes in the eighteenth century. In her account of The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 5 she describes Manley, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth as creating “rhetorical constructions” that are neither identical nor really distinct from their authors, and that share many characteristics with her category of “explicit, fictional Nobodies” (1994: xix). She acknowledges the autobiographical dimension of some of her case studies, speaking of Rivella and of another of Manley’s texts (The New Atalantis) as confessional, for instance (see 127, 137). Yet, arguably because her focus is on a development towards prototypical nineteenth-century realism, she considers the rhetorical self-constructions of these authors as a stage in the development towards fictional characters rather than as early forms of autofictional self-presentation. In the next section, a cognitively underpinned and holistic consideration of text and context of Rivella will establish that the latter is for Manley more apt, however. 4 Autofictional Publishing as (Self-)Marketing Delarivier Manley (1663-1724) lived an unconventional life for a woman of the early eighteenth century. She worked in diverse genres, including plays, epistolary volumes, and political satire, and is special in earning a living through her writing, at least at intervals. She became famous for her works, but also for personal and political scandals. The Adventures of Rivella constitutes her self-portrait, in part in direct refutation of what others have said and might say about her. It is not straightforwardly an act of self-presentation, however. Rivella evokes the illusion, albeit in a somewhat transparent manner, of being based on the transcript of a conversation between Sir Charles Lovemore and the Chevalier D’Aumont, the former of whom serves as textinternal narrator for most of the text. As we learn in a purported translator’s preface, the book was first published in French by the Gentleman of the Chamber of the Chevalier, whom Lovemore had apparently dictated the content of his conversation to. Rivella, we are invited to pretend, is the result of this transcription in translation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 136 Alexandra Effe Figure 1: Frontispiece to Delarivier Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Image by courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. In presenting this frame, Rivella adheres to conventions of pseudofactual pretence. Readers are asked to pretend to believe that they read a historical document recording a conversation that actually occurred. They are not meant to really believe this, however, since the text also makes apparent that Manley as author has creatively created this illusion for us. The frontispiece and the in‐ troduction already expose the pretence to the text’s origin in a real conversation as an illusion, and moreover gesture towards a creative author as the origin of the book. They draw attention to the text’s fictional dimension (although initial readers would not have labelled it as such). In the introduction, a third-person 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 137 narrator, who can realistically be neither Lovemore nor Manley, shows us D’Aumont and Lovemore as they are strolling through the gardens of Somerset House - the scene in which their conversation about the famous Rivella will take place. This third-person omniscient narrative voice - a convention of fiction - recurs at intervals in the main body of the text. The frontispiece (figure 1) depicts the scene of the introduction: Lovemore and D’Aumont next to the Thames. Janine Barchas (2003: 56-57) observes acutely that the two men face the reader “so as to conspiratorially include him or her in their conversation”. That they address readers as much as one another suggests a fictional mode of communication in addition to establishing the pseudofactual frame. Introduction and frontispiece thus both announce a hybrid mode. Since Rivella, through introduction and frontispiece, gestures towards the author who has creatively crafted the text, and who is also the subject of this book, Rivella should be, so this chapter’s argument, considered autofictional rather than pseudofactual or fictional. The book, as so many at this point in time, was initially published anony‐ mously, but its publication history makes clear that Rivella had to be read as being by and about Manley, and that neither the anonymous publication nor the diaphanous anagram of the title was intended to, or did, fool many readers. Manley’s publisher, Edmund Curll, a notorious figure in the eighteenth-century book market, certainly expected her to be recognised as author and subject. We must speculate about Curll’s and Manley’s motivations and actions to some extent, but the following is what likely took place, based in part on what Curll himself writes in a preface to the fourth edition of Rivella. Curll put out word that he would publish a negative account of Manley’s life, attacking her as a pro-Tory writer. The piece was to be written by the hack writer Charles Gildon. Curll’s recent biographers, Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (2007: 52), suspect that he made this announcement in order to “blackmail Manley into working for him”. Manley indeed approached Curll and requested to write the book herself. Curll agreed, as Manley’s biographer, Rachel Carnell (2008: 15), suspects, because he thought that a text written by the famous Manley would sell better. If Curll did not expect readers to know that Manley was the author and the subject of this book, neither the blackmail ploy nor allowing Manley to write the book herself in the end would be reasonably motivated. Curll, in other words, does not have motivation for his actions if he expects readers to read fictionally, nor if he expects them to read pseudofactually. He must have anticipated what we can now call autofictional reading. Moreover, the four editions of Manley’s book (three of which were published during her lifetime and one shortly after her death) consecutively make author‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 138 Alexandra Effe 6 This edition appeared in October 1724, while the date on the title page is 1725 (see Carnell 2017: 17, 28n12). Curll’s preface is dated 29 Sept. 1724. From the second edition onwards, the book appears with a key, identifying most of the historical people commented on. ship and autobiographical content more apparent. The Adventures of Rivella; Or, the History of the Author of the Atalantis. With Secret Memoirs and Characters of several considerable Persons her Contemporaries (1714) first becomes The Adventures of Rivella; Or, the History of the Author of the Four Volumes of the New Atalantis (1715), then is republished as Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Manley (Author of the Atalantis), Containing Not only the History of Her Adventures, but Likewise an Account of the most considerable Amours in the Court of King Charles II’d (1717), and finally, in a posthumously published edition, appears as Mrs. Manley’s History of Her Own Life and Times (1724 6 ). While the author is initially identifiable only through her link to The Atalantis, and while the focus is in the first editions more on political and societal commentary, the later editions direct attention more strongly to Rivella/ Manley, who is in 1724 explicitly named both as author and main subject of the book. In sum, the publication history - how Rivella first came into being and also changes in peritextual material of subsequent editions - shows that the book’s value for readers lies in large part in the fact that Manley is author and subject, and that the fictional dimension (for example, third-person omniscient narrative voice, conversational frame exposed as illusion, and invented names) does not detract from Rivella’s autobiographical appeal. That we see this only if we look at the publication context and read the text in light of eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions confirms that a holistic and contextual angle is necessary to recognise Rivella as an autofictional text. 5 Autofictional Effects through Deictic Ambiguity The fact that Rivella is a generic hybrid is in itself not particularly noteworthy. Neither is that readers were ready to accept the text as fictionally shaped and nonetheless as revelatory about its author. Manley’s book stems after all from a period when it was quite common to combine reportorial and invented elements, and when boundaries between factual and fictional modes were not yet clearly drawn. What Manley does is different, however, from ‘news/ novels discourse’ or pseudofactual signalling. Davis (1996 [1983]: 115) correctly notes that the fictional component of Rivella (and he also refers to The New Atalantis) serves to avoid legal persecution, namely to protect Manley “from the punishment of the libel laws.” She exposed and satirised others, and therefore had to be cautious in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 139 7 Text World Theory was pioneered by Paul Werth; for overviews, see Gavins (2007), Gavins and Lahey (2016), and Gibbons and Whiteley (2018, chapter 17). how she presented her work. Safety is only one effect of Manley’s hybrid mode, however, and an effect merely of the combination of the fictional and the factual. Manley, importantly, also combines the fictional with the autobiographical, and the resulting autofictional mode has additional effects. About Rivella’s autobiographical dimension, Davis says that “every detail, every characteristic [of Manley] is preserved in print” (1996: 118). This statement neglects that Manley, through this text, hides and ambiguates at least as much as she reveals. In Rivella, Manley develops an autofictional mode that allows her to present an image of herself that remains mutable and elusive, that constitutes resistance against being confined to one single identity, that serves as challenge to the roles assigned to women by societal convention, and that functions to promote herself as author and as public figure. How she achieves these effects is understood best through a cognitive perspective on how readers most likely process(ed) the text. The kind of cognitive approach advocated in this chapter can involve a mul‐ titude of theoretical accounts, empirical studies, and also analysis of responses by flesh-and-blood readers. This chapter showcases one of these components. It offers an account of autofictional reading based in Text World Theory and shows how this framework elucidates the workings of Manley’s book in its historical context, while also allowing to describe general mechanisms underlying autofiction. Text World Theory is a comprehensive cognitive stylistic account of discourse processing, and, by making use of it in the analysis of a literary text, this chapter demonstrates one important current trend in literary and cultural studies - namely, the joining of forces in interdisciplinary endeavours to better understand the cognitive-affective effects of literary and non-literary discourse, including effects of specific narrative strategies. Text World Theory is itself representative of new developments in the study of language (related to those in literary and cultural studies). The framework forms part of a cognitive and contextual turn towards embodied situatedness and pragmatic effects. Text World Theory draws on philosophical, psychological, and cognitive approaches and integrates syntactical and contextual criteria in order to explain how we form meaning from textual and paratextual cues. 7 The theory builds on Deictic Shift Theory, which explains how markers that are relative and contextually defined - like ‘here/ there’, ‘yesterday’/ ’tomorrow’ - cue us to take on a particular perspective. We cognitively project to the perspective of the deictic centre, usually the speaker or the person thinking, in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 140 Alexandra Effe 8 For an overview of Deictic Shift Theory and its application in literary and discourse analysis, see Gibbons and Whiteley (2018, chapter 13). For a categorisation of different forms of deixis in literary texts, see Stockwell (2020, 54). order to understand a given speech act from this perspective. When someone says, ‘on my right’, for example, we understand them to be referring to what is on their right side rather than ours. 8 Text World Theory claims that when we process discourse, we construct subjective mental representations, referred to as ‘text-worlds’. We do so on the basis of textual cues, but also on the basis of previous knowledge and experience. For each entity that speaks or thinks in a novel, for example, we, according to Text World Theory, build such a mental world model and project to this entity to understand what they say or think. The modelling process includes constructing a given entity’s consciousness, that is, imagining as best as we can their beliefs, goals, attitudes, and emotions. The theory is helpful in thinking about how we process autofictional texts, but must for this purpose be somewhat adapted. In Text World Theory, worlds are conceptualised as fairly closed off, and usually thought of in spatial terms. Autofictional texts, however, often feature shifts between references to textual and extratextual reality, and moreover references that apply to two levels at once - at the same time to character and author, for example. Such texts frequently allow only for a partial, interrupted, and uncertain cognitive projection to a given entity’s text-world. Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 (2014), forming part of the contemporary boom in autofictional writing, can serve to demonstrate this quality of autofiction, before we return to the eighteenth century and to Rivella. Lerner’s text shows exemplarily that autofiction invites readers to relocate to a narrator’s or character’s text-world only partially. The first-person narrator, a writer-character once identified within the book as ‘Ben,’ has been commis‐ sioned to write his second novel by expanding on a short story of Lerner that initially appeared in the New Yorker and that is reprinted also within 10: 04. The narrator at one point reflects, “Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them” (Lerner 2014: 194). The reference to “the book you’re reading now” points double-deictically both to the book that the narrator-character is writing and to the book that we are reading, that is, the book that Lerner has written. The “I” of the text, in consequence, refers double-deictically both to the narrator-character and to the historical Lerner. The “you”, analogously, refers both to a narratee and to flesh-and-blood readers. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 141 9 Manley, Delarivier (2005 [1714]), The Adventures of Rivella (Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, Vol. 4, edited by Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman, 1-58 [London, Pickering & Chatto]), p.-7. All subsequent references in parentheses are to this edition. The theoretical framework of Text World Theory can be applied to this kind of text if one modifies the theory to encompass dual, uncertain, or partial readerly positioning. An autofictional reading mode, so this chapter’s claim, involves cognitive projection into the perspectives of a narrator and of characters, but to perceive a narrator and/ or character’s text-world as also that of the author. Autofictional reading, in addition, entails uncertainty about the degree to which such alignment of worlds and entities is adequate. In Rivella, as we will see, this kind of double and uncertain readerly positioning serves strategic effects of value in the book’s original context of production. The introduction to Rivella ends with a shift of deictic centre, namely from the extradiegetic third-person narrator to Lovemore, who “began his Discourse in this manner”. 9 Lovemore’s discourse is what we read for large parts of the remainder of the text, interspersed by short comments from D’Aumont, and interjections by a narrator voice that indicates the speaker (“Methinks, Monsieur le Chevalier, continu’d Lovemore” [18], or “Thus my dear D’Aumont, continued Sir Charles” [101]). The shift to Lovemore as deictic centre is not complete, however. Rivella is Manley’s most obvious alter ego in this text, but Lovemore, as the narratorial voice, functions as another alter ego. Especially since he at times takes on an omniscient narratorial stance, we are likely to also see Manley in his statements, attitudes, and beliefs, or at least to wonder whether Manley is speaking through her textinternal narrator. As is typical for autofiction, readers are asked to cognitively project to a narrator-figure and to acknowledge this figure as a textually created entity (we would now perhaps call him fictional or fictive), but to retain awareness of the fact that Manley as author has created this narratorial entity, and to reflect on how far what the narrator says, feels, and believes represents attitudes of the author. This is the case even though Lovemore also stands in for a historical person. We are, in sum, invited to construct a mind-model of the author based on what the text tells us about Rivella, but also on the basis of what Lovemore says and thinks. At the same time, we are reminded that neither of these sources allows us to model the historical author with any certainty. In processing the text, in other words, we likely project cognitively-emotion‐ ally to Lovemore, but at the same time to Manley as author. The effect of this double-positioning of the readership is a noncommittal speaking position that serves Manley very well. The complex overlaying of perspectives allows Manley for example to criticise Lovemore’s and D’Aumont’s biases, and by implication 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 142 Alexandra Effe those of others who might claim to pronounce on her life and character, while simultaneously capitalising on the men’s perspectives. Through Lovemore’s and D’Aumont’s eyes, Manley appears as alluring and enticingly out of reach. D’Aumont has never met Rivella, but believes that her writing gives him access to her person. He hopes to experience the “Raptures” she tells of in her writing, because he is certain that, if she has “but half so much of the Practice, as the Theory, in the Way of Love, she must certainly be a most accomplish’d Person” (8). The statement refers to two ontological levels simultaneously, namely to Rivella as textinternal character and to the author whose writing the two gentlemen admire. D’Aumont and Lovemore, in a subsequent lengthy section, praise Rivella/ Manley’s character and physique, and, over the course of the narrative, grow increasingly besotted with their image of the author. Manley, through depicting these men’s obsession, mocks the kind of celebrity culture in which a reader, like D’Aumont, becomes enamoured with an image of the author created purely from their work. Rivella nonetheless also contributes to such celebrity culture, since Manley invites her readers to engage with her text as a substitute experience of the author. It is noteworthy also that Manley does not merely use the opportunity to tell her own life story to whitewash and idealise herself. She does not simply ask us to endorse the views proffered by Lovemore and D’Aumont. She presents an ambiguous self-portrait, and the text emphasises that she has not been fully revealed. Lovemore’s bias is exposed when he wonders whether he will be able to provide an “Impartial History” (10), and even more when he claims to be “neither blind to Rivella’s Weaknesses and Misfortunes, as being once her lover, nor angry and severe as remembering [he] could never be Beloved” (29). Manley, in including such commentary, draws attention to the fact that the account that Rivella constitutes is not entirely trustworthy, and by implication warns readers of distortions in other accounts about Manley that are in circulation or that might be told in the future. The ambiguation that results from Manley’s autofictional doubling of her voice also allows the author to, at her desire, own or disown what her charac‐ ter says. The noncommittal autofictional speaking position - inhabiting her narrators’ voice to an extent but also distancing herself from it - serves her to denounce opponents without seeming to do so herself, to keep different career paths open, and as political strategising. Lovemore, for instance, denounces in Manley’s name The New Atalantis, Manley’s previous work, which satirises the Whigs, as a “heinious Offence, and the notorious Indiscretion of which [Rivella/ Manley and the booksellers and printers] had been guilty” (56). Should the Whigs come to power (as they indeed did), this would allow Manley to claim 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 143 the judgment as her own, suggesting regret for her Tory propaganda. Otherwise she could have distanced herself from what Lovemore is saying but not she. That Manley strategically uses her text to promote herself and to respond to eighteenth-century political upheavals is not a new insight. Her clever political manoeuvring, for example, has been described in detail by Carnell (2008: 11-21). The cognitively underpinned analysis offered above nonetheless allow us to better understand how Manley’s text creates its effects within its original context of publication, and also to better understand the workings of autofiction more generally. 6 Autofiction within Eighteenth-Century Genre Transformations The cognitive and holistic perspective adopted in this chapter offers insights not only into how Rivella worked as a strategically shaped act of self-performance - asserting affects through claims to real-world reference and through fictional craft - it also lets us draw conclusions about generic developments in the eighteenth-century literary landscape at large. If we recognise that Rivella (and other texts of the period) are autofictional rather than pseudofactual or fictional, it becomes apparent that autofictional and pseudofactual texts existed parallely, as did (and do) fictional and autofictional texts. If the fictional replaces the pseudofactual, but the autofictional persists, the logical conclusion must be that the autofictional serves different purposes - purposes that, as the contemporary boom of autofiction attests to, are still important, although autofiction’s forms, aims, and effects have in part been transformed. In the eighteenth century, in particular, but continuing throughout literary history, autofictional texts serve authorial self-marketing. Where pseudofactual texts are about unknown contemporary everyday people (see Paige 2011: 28- 29), and fictional texts tell the stories of invented nobodies (sensu Gallagher), autofictional texts are about a known somebody who wishes to be known even more widely, and sometimes wishes to be known slightly differently. For this, the author needs to be able to speak and to be heard as speaking, which is not possible with a pseudofactual stance that foregrounds the ostensible rather than the actual author (say, Crusoe over Defoe). An openly autobiographical mode might seem to be the best option, but self-presentation unabashedly offered as such was perceived as unseemly in the eighteenth century. For Manley, speaking unambiguously in her own voice would moreover have meant to make herself vulnerable for criticism concerning what she says about others. In addition, a straightforwardly autobiographical mode would have taken away 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 144 Alexandra Effe some of the effects that come through the seemingly external perspective on Rivella/ Manley. Lastly, an autobiographical mode does not, or to lesser extent, allow authors to show their ability to craft, which is an important part of autofictional self-promotion. An autofictional mode provides a solution. It enables authors to showcase craft, and to market themselves and their writing, while seeming to remain modest. Additionally, the mode enables them to speak about themselves and society in a noncommittal voice that serves as a safety net and also to keep full disclosure enticingly out of reach. In the eighteenth-century socio-cultural and literary landscape all of this is particularly opportune, since the newly emergent author concept calls for self-marketing, but strict rules are in place about which kinds of self-presentation are allowed in which contexts. It is plausible that, since neither pseudofactual nor fictional or autobiographical modes allow for promoting the author as author, autofictional forms begin to flourish at this time. By looking at eighteenth-century texts anew through an autofictional lens, we are able to better see how textual forms like we find them in Rivella serve these functions. In a second step, we can ask how forms and functions of autofiction transform over the course of literary history. There are other eighteenth-century authors whose work can productively be discussed as autofictional (for example Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne) (see Effe 2025). Although none of them would have thought of themselves as writing autofiction, of course, exploring the autofictional dimension of their texts promises new insights into their work, into how autofictional practice works at this time, and into how it develops. 7 Conclusion This chapter has shown that the concept of autofiction, despite its flaws, helps us to better see, and with more precision analyse, particular phenomena and elements that the term directs our attention to. The new direction that this chapter has taken the study of autofiction in, namely extending the concept diachronically and approaching it through a holistic and cognitive perspective, does not promise clearer definitions, but it enriches our understanding of autofiction as a vibrant textual and contextual phenomenon. In addition, the approach taken, and the case study discussed, point to themes, subfields, and methodologies that have in recent years been increasingly prominent in literary and cultural studies, and that by all appearance will in the future continue to gain traction. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 145 The example showcased here, of how a holistic and cognitive account of Manley’s Adventures of Rivella allows us to better understand generic develop‐ ments over the course of the eighteenth century, offering insights, in particular, into forms and workings of fictionality, into literary conventions, and into aesthetic values and modes of perception, is intended to serve as an incentive for further development of the following important topics, new approaches, and emergent trajectories in the field of literary and cultural studies. For one, the chapter has developed an approach within the relatively new interdisciplinary conjuncture of cognitive literary studies - a field and method that explores how concepts, theories, and empirical research in cognitive sciences can enrich our understanding of literary texts, as well as what literature can teach us about cognition. Approaches within cognitive literary studies often centre on readers, studying flesh-and-blood people but also offering theoretical models. In this focus, cognitive literary studies shares interests with new formalist approaches, which constitute another important new direction for literary and cultural studies. These fields and approaches are concerned with how cultural artifacts exert effects at individual and collective level, often with a focus specifically on formal elements. To acknowledge the power of cultural productions and to try to get to the bottom of their workings and value will certainly continue to be an important endeavour in years to come. Secondly, this chapter’s discussion of formal effects in eighteenth-century autofiction points to a new direction that narratological research has taken in the new millennium - to the subfield of a diachronic narratology, which asks whether, or in how far, it is possible to make universal statements about narrative, or whether a focus on historical specificities and an interest in functional shifts of narrative forms, structures, and strategies is required. Similar questions are posed about cognitive approaches - namely, whether we can, on the basis of studies from the twentieth and twenty-first century, make claims about the minds and cognitive processes of people from earlier times. This chapter has shown that cognitive approaches are indeed productive also in diachronic perspective, but also that, in such cases, in particular, it is vital to integrate research on sociohistorical context, specifically on generic conventions and aesthetic tastes. Thirdly, the topic of fictionality, research on which, exempting some precur‐ sors, emerged around the 1970s and 80s, has in the last decades rapidly gained traction. It continues to be debated how the concept of fictionality relates to that of the novel and to literature more generally as well as to that of factuality, which is, importantly, not to be seen as an oppositional term. There is vibrant discussion on whether fictionality is best thought of as confined 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 146 Alexandra Effe to the realm of art and moreover to specific historical, cultural, and generic contexts, or whether it is an ahistorical, universal part of speech and thought. This chapter has contributed to fictionality studies through considering the generic conventions and truth claims of eighteenth-century pseudofactual and novelistic texts in relation to those of autofictional ones. The chapter has shown that fictionality can take various forms and serve various functions, and that some of these are historically specific. Research on fictionality, especially as the increasingly interdisciplinary field towards which it has in recent years developed, if anything gains in importance in the context of the twenty-first century’s new media developments (including phenomena like infotainment and virtual realities), information crises, and political changes, as well as in the context of recent insights about the creative workings of perception and memory. This chapter’s account of Manley’s Rivella within the eighteenth-century landscape of generic hybridity and from a cognitive perspective can serve as incentive for further work in literary and cultural studies in all of the directions charted above. It can inspire further diachronic extension of autofiction, and further work on continuities as well as developments in genre signals, authorial positioning, and forms and effects of fictionality (as well as autofictionality). This chapter can serve as invitation also for adopting a cognitive and holistic approach to contemporary (autofictional) texts. Analogously to how Manley’s autofictional speaking position was analysed in the context of the in the eighteenth century newly emerging concept of authorship and against the background of generically undifferentiated factual-fictional hybridity, one can read Lerner’s in-process commissioned book and his acts of reader address in the context of collaborative and continuous acts of self-creation in the increasingly digitised and increasingly virtualised media culture of the twenty-first century. Ferrante’s autofictional presentation by way of a fictional alter ego and through a pseudonym could be explored in the context of a culture that invites us to create various imaginary avatars of ourselves, and Knausgård’s imaginative freedoms in reconstructing and/ or creating personal memory could be analysed in light of insights about the creative dimension of memory work. It would be productive also to compare the formal strategies and structures of these contemporary works of autofiction with earlier examples, and to, by way of such an investigation into shifting forms and effects, try to determine the role of contemporary autofictional hybridity, and of this mode’s popularity, within twenty-first-century proclamations of a ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-factual age’. If we were to try to delineate one common strand between the above-descri‐ bed directions that literary and cultural studies is moving towards, it might be 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 147 an interest in cross-transfers between insights gained from and pertaining to artistic artifacts, on the one side, and everyday contexts, for example, everyday discourse and everyday cognition, on the other side - a trend that importantly goes hand in hand with increased awareness of contextual, historical, media, and generic specificities. 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