I posted about this word a couple months ago, but doubt that anybody remembers it. The definition in my dictionary makes it exclusively a legal term. I'm not sure what meaning was intended in Brander Matthews 1907 discussion of the short story as an art form:
" Brief tales of another kind were known to the ancients, Oriental in their origin, for the most part, and abounding in that liking for the supernatural, which characterizes the majority of the stories that have come to us from the East. There are the rambling Egyptian narratives,—the tale, for example, of the “Two Brothers” and the “Story of the Shipwrecked Sailors,” which scholars have only recently replevined from the buried papyrus. "

replevin
n.
5ME < Anglo-Fr replevine < OFr replevir, to warrant, pledge < re3, again + plevir, to pledge < ML plevium, warranty, PLEDGE6 Law
1 the recovery of goods by the person claiming to own them, on a promise to test the matter in court and give the goods up again if defeated
2 the writ by which one takes over the goods
vt.
REPLEVY

which scholars have only recently replevined from the buried papyrus

Is this a reference to Burton and the 1001 nights?

He did it again! I think I know what he meant, "the writing of prose". But I'll bet it is hard to find in any dictionary.
"So far as the Greeks are concerned, this need not surprise us, since it was only in their decline that they took to prose. In the splendid period of their richest accomplishment they had found fit expression for their imaginings only in poetry; and there is significance in the fact that no one of the nine muses had been assigned to foster prosefiction."

Edit: He used it a second time, but with a hyphen suggesting he had coined it:
"But even if the more careless prose-fictions of the Greeks and of the Latins are far inferior artistically to the larger Attic poems and to the lighter Roman lyrics, still they are immensely superior to the chaotic narratives which are all we can discover in the dark ages that followed the downfall of Imperial rule. Medieval fiction is not unfairly represented by the “Gesta Romanorum,” that storehouse of tales of all sorts and of all lengths, gathered from the ends of the earth and heaped up at haphazard."

I find nothing in either OED2 or W3 that warrants any other than a Law application for replevin. I think he should have stuck with 'recover'.

as to prosefiction, this looks like it should be read "no one had been assigned to foster prose fiction."

If the Tale of the Two Brothers is what I think it is, it's in Herodotus's account of Egyptian antiquities. Doesn't stop a hieroglyphic or hieratic version having been found of course.

Bingley

It took me a while to put it together, but prosefiction looks to me like a word for trumped up charges being brought to court and being used to wrongfully convict an innocent person.