18. Read the text and answer the questions. 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.

The Printed Word

Guttenberg’s revolution took place in the city of Mainz. That’s where he built and operated the first ever printing press with movable metal letters. Simple printing methods had existed for centuries, of course, but they had to be done by hand and took a long time. What made Guttenberg’s press so different was the individual letters themselves – the ‘type’ could quickly and easily be moved to create different pages. Suddenly, this made it possible to print books cheaper and more quickly than ever before.

Thanks to Guttenberg’s discovery written fiction was able to reach a massive new audience – but not straight away. It was a gradual process which slowly took place over several generations as…(1) more and more printing presses began to operate across Europe, (2) thanks to the Renaissance and the gradual spread of education, more and more people learned to read.

The Novel

When Guttenberg was alive, poetry and drama were the most important forms of literature. That was still the case as written fiction continued to develop and spread during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, though, a new form appeared which had an enormous intact on literature at the time and has dominated it ever since… the novel.

Early novelists in the English language like Samuel Richardson (1689 – 1761) and Lawrence Sterne (1713 – 1768) caused a sensation across Europe with books such as Clarissa (Richardson) and The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy (Sterne). The reason was simple… their stories which were full of believable characters and exciting adventures, described life in a more realistic way than ever before. In that sense, some critics believe that the novel took literature back to its roots by entertaining ordinary people with tales of everyday life.

But whatever the reasons for its success, the new literary form was certainly well-established by 1800, and popularity grew even faster during the nineteenth century. This accelerated popularity was due to the industrial Revolution which made Europe richer than ever before and increased…

• standards of education

• numbers of public libraries

• leisure time for the new ‘middle classes’.

Together, all these factors produced a massive literary boom during the nineteenth century – a boom which led to huge profits for publishers and made bestselling authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy world-famous names. At its peak, in fact, literature was undoubtedly the developed world’s most dynamic and popular art form. Amazingly, through, within just two generations of that nineteenth-century peak, radio, cinema and finally television had all appeared on the scene. Suddenly, written fiction had to compete for its audience.