Fiction makes up the content of many books for us now, but it was not always like that. For a long time, books were thought of as always being truthful. Most people only saw books in a church, like the Bible. Monks would study books about science and philosophy. So it is no surprise that books were assumed to be telling the truth. When reading fiction, one would usually come into it knowing the book is not genuine. People did not have that mental agreement back then.
Books could be fictional in those times, but people may not have always known. There were many fictional tales about Alexander. According to those tales, he could fly in an airplane or go underwater in a glass barrel submarine. These stories were popular in the Middle Ages. They got rewritten so many times, that at some point people realized they are fiction.
The first real fiction book may have been King Arthur. Prior books may be fictional, but most people use fiction as when both reader and author know the book is not real. It became very popular, and with it, fiction as a whole became more popular. Fictional tales became well-liked by the French Aristocracy. It took some time for it to reach the rest of the people, but by the 19th century, books were divided by fiction and non-fiction.
I found it really interesting how fiction had to develop as its own category of works. Many of the legends that we view as fictional today were once genuine ways to explain the world. I'd like to hear about how people who may have been unfamiliar with fiction first experienced it.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought it was very interesting how fiction is often blended in with non-fiction throughout history, like no matter if it was an exaggeration of the writer or there was simply misconceptions made through time, most of the histories that we now know are not 100% accurate. I know there's a bunch of Chinese stories that was greatly exaggerated or never even happened like the 3 kingdoms and Hua Mulan.
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