'Givens, pleasures, and imaginings': Supplement: Beyond Truth: Narratives of Fiction and Disinformation

It’s conventional to open an Afterword with admiring remarks on the importance of the collection that precedes. Let’s take that, for now, as a given (a term to which we shall return). I want to begin, instead, with a series of questions, prompted by the discombobulating yet spurring fact that here I am, a comparatist literary historian, writing in a journal whose readers and authors I and fellow literary historians often label, admiringly if ever so slightly scoffingly, ‘historians proper’. Can we, on reading these vivid and varied studies of how fiction and disinformation contributed to cultural change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, tell whether their authors belong to a history or a literary studies department? Are their disciplinary identities present in the nature of what they examine, how they examine it and the manner in which they present their findings? A starting point for this special issue was the conviction that, as Emma Claussen and Luca Zenobi put it in their Introduction, ‘textuality, evidence and truthfulness do not belong to any one discipline’.1 These editors have as their respective institutional homes, at the time of writing, a modern languages and a history faculty. If, as they observe, ‘the work of historians and literary scholars has never been more closely aligned’, are such labels as ‘historian’ and ‘literary historian’ nowadays little more than conveniences?