My dissertation reframes the history of the novel in America as a history of fictionality. It asks how our understanding of early American literature might change if we shifted our view from a prehistory of the nineteenth-century novel to the varied uses of the fictional mode in the early republic. Emphasizing the diversity of understandings of fictionality circulating in early America, it offers an anatomy of these forms and conceptions of fictionality, recovering the array of social, political, and aesthetic uses of fiction in this period of dynamic experimentation.