4 ms·

Fiction vs. nonfiction – English literature's made-up divide

• thescribe 11y ago
  I feel we would lose something without the ability to label and judge some works against the truth.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• aaron695 11y ago
  I call BS. I know it's quaint to realise something 'normal' isn't normal and it makes for a good just so story, but fiction and non-fiction seems like it's pretty straight up going to happen in books, true or made up. A logical divide that would cross cultures. I suspect this is more about word play and translations and odd books stores than a thing. Their evidence seems pretty thin but it's a nice story so perhaps it doesn't matter.
• x1798DE 11y ago
  From Google n-gram, it seems to me like the idea of nonfiction is a modern addition to English [1]. Since this roughly corresponds with the huge explosion of communications technologies (as you'd probably expect, since once information storage and transmission become cheap you need better ways to categorize it), I wouldn't be surprised to find that in many languages you just import the word as a loan from English rather than coming up with your own word. 1. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=non+fiction&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnon%20fiction%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=non+fiction&ye...
• cafard 11y ago
  It is a bit odd to lump so many different sorts of writing under "nonfiction": history, mathematics, philosophy, biology, ... Having said that, one comes to books marked "fiction" with very different expectations. People have always found Ford Maddox Ford's reminiscences uncomfortable because he made so much stuff up. One does not expect a memoir to have minute accuracy--much is necessarily omitted. But there is a difference between leaving things out and shifting emphases and making up incidents that never happened.