Anyone have an idea of what the first novel was to use an antiquarian, "found manuscript" frame, i.e. to use the fiction that the novel we're reading is a manuscript from an earlier period? Common in early Gothic fiction but not sure where/when this literary framing strategy first emerged.
Would you count Don Quixote? I’m not sure the fictitious manuscript is antiquarian, but isn’t some of it supposedly translated from an Arabic writer?
Yeah, I think this is probably the best case here, it sort of predates the rise of historical antiquarianism that gives the frame narrative more rhetorical power in, say, the 18th century but this is a great, solid antecedent!
"old Arabic manuscripts" had a lot of rhetorical power in post-reconquista Spain
(and in case of Don Quixote, the Arabic manuscript being about a character contemporary to the readers who just got into the old chivalric romances too much added to the comedy)
Don Quixote itself was a pastiche of chivalric romances from the 15th-16th century that used it a lot
The story of Atlantis in Plato's Socratic dialogs seem similar to this, but obviously there's no continuity with the writings others are mentioning. It surprises me that this is that recent
Sir Orfeo (14th c, Middle English) claims to be retelling a Breton lay (speaks of the Breton harpers singing of the ancient king), but of course it's retelling the Orpheus and Eurydice story—but with fairies.
Also, c. 1200, Marie de France, writing in Anglo-Norman French, claims to be translating Breton lais. However, in a number of instances, there are no known sources.
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Got good answers down thread, so thanks for all your collective brilliance, folks!
Oh, Don Quixote does this? To some extent?
To a HUGE extent and it was already a worn out cliche in chivalric romances that Din Quixote was a pastiche of
Awesome, that makes so much sense! (Someday I'll read Quixote)
This one predates Don Quixote by a century (and is often referred to by Cervantes) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amad%C3...
![The earliest surviving print edition of the text was compiled by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo and published in four volumes in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1508. It was written in Spanish. There were likely earlier printed editions, which are now lost.[2] Fragments of a manuscript of Book III dating from the first quarter of the 15th century, discovered in a bookbinding (now in the The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) show that, in addition to making amendments, Montalvo also made an abbreviation to the older text. In the introduction to his publication, Montalvo explains that he edited the first three volumes from texts in circulation since the 14th century and added a fourth volume not previously published in book form. He later also published a sequel to the romance under the title Las sergas de Esplandián, which he claimed was discovered in a chest buried in Constantinople and transported to Spain by a Hungarian merchant (the famous motif of the found manuscript).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dcemjvokay2c32epoxmf7ikr/bafkreiga5cjvt4dgasgskl4v6jtkf4xdod4frxg5cg7ukgfn24wqvnyazm@jpeg)
Oh I've read about Amadis of Gaul! Thanks for pointing out the frame narrative here. Very helpful!
The Scarlett Letter is the earliest that immediately jumps to mind for me but it cannot be the earliest
Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa predates The Scarlet Letter by 35 years but I’m sure there are also earlier examples than that.
Earliest I know is Walpole's Otranto in 1764
Well after Walpole's Otranto (1764) but haven't read Hawthorne so good to know!
I’ve read Otranto but did not remember it had a frame narrative at all, that’s fun
Its not particularly exciting, just "I'm a guy who found this old manuscript from the 1500s but it was probably written earlier in the 1300s" and has the effect of questionimg the emerging practice of non-Romantic historical writing (really good stuff on this in the Cambridge History of the Gothic)
proper full translations of Don Quixote to English including part 2 which uses this the most appeared only in the 18th century, with somewhat accurate ones being only in the 1740s-1750s, so I wonder if they were a direct influence there if that's when the trope starts being popular in English
I wonder too! It seems the kind of thing that Walpole likely would have read.
I guess it also might be important if you care about “this is a translation of an earlier text I found that is ancient” frames vs The Scarlet Letter’s “I found this literal book in the attic” frames
Hmm, yeah, I think in this case I'm curious about the explicit antiquarian framing of "this is a thing from history"
By "frame" do you mean that the audience was expected to understand it was a contrivance? Because there's a fair number of forged antiquities in the late 18th/early 19th c.
Yes, the audience is essentially clued in. I'm thinking here of explicitly literary narratives, not forgeries, though the presence of forgeries (Ossian being the most famous?) no doubt influenced this in fiction. The earliest I know is Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764).
so… not the zohar or sefer ha-yashar then got it
In Don Quixote the audience was already clued in, while the audience of the chivalric romances that inspired Cervantes (and Don Quixote himself) probably mostly wasn’t, with Don Quixote himself tragically believing the romances to be real
For a novel this old, a lot of stuff in Don Quixote is surprisingly modern, including all the metafictional bits like when in part 2 Don Quixote reads the fake Don Quixote part 2 by Avellaneda, finds it full of lies and so decides to set the record straight en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_...
Cervantes was procrastinating on writing part 2 for 10 years but finally managed to write it thanks to Avellaneda, since he was furious that someone else dared to write his own sequel. Given that he died a year later, without Avellaneda's version the real part 2 would likely never get finished.
(probably wouldn't work on George R.R. Martin, though)
Yeah, Ossian was my main thought (well, that and Zohar) but by your criteria I can't think of anything earlier than Walpole.
i actually first thought of midrash sefer hayashar which takes it a step further and claims to be a book already cited twice in the bible, and also is through a circuitous path semicanonical in mormonism
the first printing features an opening note saying it was found in the ruins of the temple, but it also cites nations like “Lombardy” and “Francia on the river Seine” which did not yet exist in 70 ce
That is certainly an interesting comparison to the frame narrative in the emerging novel tradition of early modern Europe!
but it convinced mordecai manuel noah, one of the first prominent american jews to be a real weird guy, just all around weirdo, and through him our boy joey smith. another one of m m noah’s ideas was that the native americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes. hm… joey… where’d you get it
a lot of the weirdest aspects of mormonism can be explained if you realize how influenced smith was by noah, who was also a rabid racist even for his time, and wanted to build the third temple on an island in the hudson
Oooh Nava Semel write an alt history novel about that guy actually creating his Isreal in New York, "Isra Isle"
Sorry, so many typos, it's late
sounds like a fun read although i do feel like the only possible point of divergence would be if the entire jewish people went batshit insane