/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20680365]

I just had a fascinating thought.

The modern USA/Western Europe has an overwhelmingly large amount of fiction books compared to other countries and other place in time. And because of this, it will be the most documented part of all time solely due to the amount of authors trying to get into the role of an average person and an average life in their books. But what about places in the past, do they have a lot of fiction books that would get you invested in a normal person who lives in say idk victorian england or a peasant in the Holy Roman Empire? You can learn so much about american culture and way of life from reading fiction books, so why can’t you use fiction books to learn about other cultures and way of life?

[Op No.20680368]

>>20680365
And also second question of the thread

When did fiction as a genre become popular?

[Anonymous No.20681386]

>>20680365
>You can learn so much about american culture and way of life from reading fiction books, so why can’t you use fiction books to learn about other cultures and way of life?
This is why historical fiction is the most underrated genre of all time and it’s annoying that it gets grouped in with fantasy/scifi or not just considered a subtype of literary fiction.
Then because it’s “genre fiction”, it immediately gets reduced to the lowest common denominator so that it becomes just “a romance set in 1880-1915 England or us”, which is dumb as it’s one of the least interesting moments of all time.
>>20680368
Probably the first time a caveman thought of telling a story that wasn’t true.
For written novels not until the printing press.