While the term “autofiction” has been in use in French since the 1970s, it has only recently become common in English (Dix 2018). Its introduction has been contested, and more than a few have suggested that the concept is modish, vacuous, or both. So what is autofiction in English? Why did English come to require this term, and what has it been used to describe? Our project seeks to model an emergent “literary system” (Bode 2018)—insofar as this is possible with an inchoate and disputed genre category like this one.