Fiction is a story created from an author’s imagination. It may be written in prose or verse. Novels and short stories are the most popular forms of fiction. Other forms of fiction include dramas and narrative poems (poems that tell a story). Fiction differs from biographies, histories, and other nonfiction, which is created entirely from facts. The word fiction comes from the Latin word fictio, which means a making or a fashioning.
Characteristics of fiction.
All fiction contains elements that are partly or entirely imaginary. Such elements include characters and settings. In some fiction, the imaginary elements are obvious. For example, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by the English author Lewis Carroll, has wildly unrealistic characters and events. But fiction does not necessarily differ much from reality. Many fictional works feature true-to-life characters and realistic settings, and some fiction is based on real people and real events. For example, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 is the background of War and Peace (1869), a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The factual elements in fiction are always combined with imaginary situations and incidents.
The chief purpose of most fiction is to entertain. But a serious work of fiction also stimulates the mind. By creating characters, placing them in specific situations, and establishing a point of view, writers of serious fiction set forth judgments. These judgments may involve moral, philosophical, psychological, or social problems. They may also concern the relationship between imagination and reality.
History.
Storytelling is as old as humanity. Prehistoric people passed on legends and myths from generation to generation by word of mouth. Fiction has appeared in a wide variety of forms since the development of writing about 5,500 years ago. But certain general forms have been dominant during various eras.
The most popular forms of fiction in ancient times included the epic and the fable. Epics are long narrative poems about heroes or gods. Two of the most famous epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were probably composed by the Greek poet Homer in the 700’s B.C. Fables are brief tales with a moral. Among the best-known fables are the animal stories attributed to the Greek slave Aesop, who lived about 600 B.C. See Epic; Fable.
From the 1100’s to the 1400’s, during the Middle Ages, the romance became the leading form of fiction. Most medieval romances tell about adventures of knights or other court figures. Many of these stories feature supernatural characters and events. See Romance.
Since the mid-1700’s, the chief forms of fiction have been the novel and the short story (see Novel; Short story). The novel flourished in England during the 1700’s and 1800’s. Henry Fielding wrote such satirical novels as Tom Jones (1749). In the 1800’s, Charles Dickens wrote sentimental novels that still criticized society. In some modern works of fiction, the authors have abandoned traditional storytelling devices, such as oversized plots and clear-cut characters and settings. The American writer Gertrude Stein used fiction to try to capture the workings of the unconscious mind. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges probed the nature of fiction itself in such collections of stories as Ficciones (1944, 1962).
