How does our daily mindreading—that is, our attribution and misattribution of mental states (such as thoughts, feelings, and intentions) to ourselves and others—differ from the mindreading we engage in when we read fiction? I have argued elsewhere (e.g., “Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA, 2015) that drama, novels, and narrative poetry play and experiment with our mindreading, by “embedding” mental states within mental states at a much greater frequency and intensity than happens either in our daily social interactions or in other written discourses. In this essay, I attempt to historicize this claim, exploring how the pattern of such embedment has changed over time in different national literary traditions, with a brief look at eighteenth-century Russian literature and a particular emphasis on ancient and modern China.