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The Story of Fiction

Literature

Literature plays a key role in global culture. It educates and entertains us, brings past centuries to life, and helps us to understand our deepest dreams and fears. How did the art of fiction-writing develop, through? Well, it’s a very, very long story…

Nobody knows when fiction began. Maybe the first story-teller was a prehistoric mother trying to explain the world to her children. Or perhaps it was a hunter making up adventures around the campfire. Who can tell?

What we do know, though, is that story-telling was a purely oral activity until around 800 B.C. Myths and tales were passed down by word of mouth and had to be memorized to each new generation of story-tellers.

That only changed when the Ancient Greeks started to keep written records of certain stories. The earliest surviving examples of this are the epic poems of Homer (a blind professional storyteller who lived in the eighth century B.C.). Why were his tales written down? Again, we can’t be certain, but obviously they were considered important enough to be formally preserved.

So, the idea of written stories began in Greece. Gradually, though, it spread across Europe. The result of this was a steady flow of poems, plays, romances and legends over the next 2,300 years, many of which can still be read today. Yet although this rich literary tradition existed, very few people could enjoy it at the time. Why? Because…(1) only the educated upper classes were able to read, (2) books had to be written by hands and, so very few copies existed.

What changed all that and brought written fiction to ordinary men and women was a machine. It was developed during the mid-fifteenth century and its inventor was a German called Johannes Guttenberg.

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