True Accounts

Abstract

‘True Accounts’ were a species of popular, sensational prose tracts, abounding in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English print culture. Even as the category of ‘fiction’ was coming into being, True Accounts made a niche for themselves by claiming to expose the truth about outlandish or arcane subjects, seemingly more suited to fictions. As a genre, True Accounts prized the exceptional over the ordinary, the singular instance over the category or pattern. True Accounts are at odds with, yet also immersed in, the contradictions of representation in early prose fiction: each genre has a strained, ambivalent relation to the real. As a form rising to popular prominence in the wake of civil war and two revolutions, the True Account reminds us that truth has itself become a newly freighted term, at once contested yet also attainable with a confidence hitherto impossible.