This study explores the theoretical discourses and rhetorical devices used by writers to legitimate fiction at a time when it was considered immoral by theologians and despised by scholars. The
use of such discourses and devices is found in titles, prefaces and throughout the narratives themselves; they are employed to assert that the narratives contain moral truths or to assert their
status as fact, thus rendering the narratives acceptable to the readership. The claim to factuality is asserted by the figure of the narrator-as-witness, who guarantees the veracity of the
facts relayed, and, from 1700 onwards, by that of the manuscript editor. Following the publication of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews in 1742, the fiction of the period begins to flaunt its own
fictionality, marking the emergence of self-reflexive fiction.
