This impressive and learned book, originally published in Swedish in 2006 (Stockholm), explores concepts of fiction in a wide and varied corpus of late-antique Latin texts, ranging from philosophical meditations and exegetic theory to commentaries, sermons, allegorical narrative and didactic, epic and lyric poetry. The main aim of the book is to explore in detail the often complex, paradoxical and/or ambivalent attitudes towards pagan literary fiction, and Classical culture at large, as developed by Christian writers. These adopt a wide range of concepts and images (such as fabula, fictum, figmentum and mendacium) to describe or assess various types of earlier literature, and often to oppose them or to distance them from true, Christian doctrine. It is impossible in a review of this length to do justice to the complexity and sophisticated nature of the arguments developed in the book about individual authors and texts, but it needs to be said at the outset that C.’s achievement is truly admirable: there is not only his outstanding control over a breathtakingly vast range of texts but also the depth, detail and nuance characterising his analyses.

The book consists of five parts. After theoretical and (mostly) historical underpinnings of different concepts of and approaches to fiction (Part 1), there follows a monumental effort to follow Augustine's evolving attitude towards Classical culture throughout the course of his life (Part 2). It focuses in particular on his views on language and (figurative) discourse. Part 3 deals with allegorical discourse in six authors (Lactantius, Servius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Fulgentius and Boethius) and the ways in which they tend to understand fictional literature as covert messages of encryptic wisdom (which C. dubs substitutive rather than mimetic fictionality). Part 4 turns to late-antique poetry with chapters on Paulinus, Proba, Prudentius and biblical epic (Juvencus, Sedulius, Avitus and Arator). Finally, Part 5 is an epilogue that looks both backward (bringing together the main strands of the book) and forward (to the Middle Ages). The volume concludes with an index nominum.

C.’s central argument is that ancient culture was subjected to complex processes of negotiation and acculturation throughout Late Antiquity, as part of which Christian writers established critical attitudes towards imagination, pretence and/or make-believe as endorsed by pagan literature; that, in other words, they ultimately sacrificed fictionality (at least in its mimetic capacity, as opposed to its substitutive variant) on the altar of Christian doctrinal truth (the metaphor surfaces on p. 605). Although this reading is reasonably persuasive for some of C.’s material, it may be less tenable if one thinks of how a good deal of late-antique Latin hagiography and Life-writing goes about fiction. Jerome's Life of Malchus, for example, blends both biblical and pagan narrative traditions (comedy and novel among other genres) and thereby foregrounds, albeit implicitly, a more tolerant and inclusive attitude towards them. In addition, it should be noted that for C., the terms ‘fiction’ and ‘fictionality’ in fact refer first and foremost to pagan mythological poetry (notably Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid). This is borne out nicely by the title of the book, evoking as it does a famous episode in the Aeneid (2.771–94), where Aeneas, in search for his wife Creusa in burning Troy, sees her ghost (or ‘shadow’, umbra) before it dissolves and disappears for good at the moment when he tries to embrace her. This image, Aeneas explains, is as he remembers his wife to have been in real life but larger. Her shadow, that is, not only resembles reality without being identical to it; it is also evasive and present at the same time, thus capturing the notion of fiction (‘Creusa no longer exists … she has already become a fiction’, p. 77).

To be sure, one of the book's merits is precisely that it teases out in great detail how pervasively pagan mythological poetry informs and shapes the writings of authors who often claim so overtly to reject it. But at the same time, the identification of such poetry with our modern term ‘fiction(ality)’ is not always self-evident. In fact, and perhaps again like Creusa's shadow in Virgil's epic, the notion of fiction itself seems to escape stable definition in this book. One indication of this is the fact that it occasionally also denotes a novel like Apuleius' Metamorphoses (e.g. p. 291 on this author as a ‘fiction-maker’). This novel is commonly called fiction because it is self-referential, a term coined by D. Cohn to indicate that ‘a work of fiction itself creates the world to which it refers by referring to it’ (The Distinction of Fiction [1999], p. 13). This self-referentiality sets Apuleius' novel apart from Virgil's or Ovid's poems, where characters and plot lines are essentially versions of pre-existent mythological material rather than creations ex nihilo (such as Lucius in Apuleius or, possibly, Loukios in his Greek model). Lactantius in fact seems to thematise precisely this idea when he stipulates that ‘the poets have not created events … but have added a certain colour’ to them (cited p. 321). In other words, when C. calls both these poets and Apuleius writers of ‘fiction’, the term in each case denotes something qualitatively different. Similarly, when in Macrobius' Saturnalia the grammarian Servius is given a role as interlocutor, he too becomes, on C.’s reading, a ‘fictional’ character (pp. 346, 348). In all these cases, it seems, wildly different ontological kinds of characters (and narratives) sail under C.’s one banner of ‘fiction’: Apuleius' Lucius, who never existed outside the narrative universe, Macrobius' Servius, who (refers to someone who) did, and Virgil's Creusa, who in mythology pre-exists Virgil's narrative universe but within it ‘no longer’ exists. The question remains how helpful it really is to call them all by the same name.

The image of shadowry in the title may, in fact, also be taken to resonate with another important strength of this book: the attention paid to transhistorical qualities of fictionality. In Late Antiquity and beyond, C. notes, figurative representations were often thought of as a series of shadows, an image that he takes as one instance of ‘verbal and conceptual continuity’ (p. 16) characterising (thinking about) fictionality. Other such instances occur throughout the book, which together with C.’s sustained focus on innovating rather than traditional writers testifies to his keen and rewarding interest in processes of longue durée (e.g. p. 225 on the importance for medieval Europe of Augustine's thoughts on the possibly distorting capacities of figures and tropes in the Bible, p. 592 on offshoots of Arator's meta-fictional comments in later medieval authors and pp. 611–14 on Isidorus of Seville's elaborate ban on literary fiction as being inspired by the distrust of fiction in earlier authors such as Jerome, Augustine, Paulinus and Prudentius).

This book, it cannot be doubted, has a wealth of material to offer, both in the primary texts (cf. the particularly useful appendix containing original quotations, pp. 633–57) and in C.’s sharp analysis and insightful interpretation of them. Along with the smooth and clear English translation also comes an update of the bibliography, so that it now also covers most of the relevant scholarship of the past decade. This book is likely to become an indispensable tool for all those working on fiction, both in Late Antiquity and beyond.