Fiction

This article is about the type of media content. For other uses, see Fiction (disambiguation).
An illustration from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, depicting the fictional protagonist, Alice, playing a fantastical game of croquet.

Fiction is the classification for any story, or element of a story, derived from imagination and not based strictly on history or fact.[1][2][3] Fiction can be expressed in a variety of formats, including writings, live performances, films, television programs, animations, video games, and role-playing games, though the term originally and most commonly refers to the narrative forms of literature (see literary fiction),[4] including the novel, novella, short story, and play. Fiction constitutes an act of creative invention, so that faithfulness to reality is not typically assumed;[5] in other words, fiction is not expected to present only characters who are actual people or descriptions that are factually true. The context of fiction is generally open to interpretation, due to fiction's freedom from any necessary embedding in reality;[6] however, some fictional works are claimed to be, or marketed as, historically or factually accurate, complicating the traditional distinction between fiction and non-fiction.[7] Fiction is a classification or category, rather than a specific mode or genre, unless used in a narrower sense as a synonym for a particular literary fiction form.[8]

Genre

Fiction is commonly broken down into a variety of genres: subsets of fiction, each differentiated by a particular unifying tone or style, narrative technique, content, or popularly defined criterion. Science fiction, for example, predicts or supposes technologies that are not realities at the time of the work's creation. For example, Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon was published in 1865 and in 1969 astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.

Historical fiction places imaginary characters into real historical events. In the early historical novel Waverley, Sir Walter Scott's fictional character Edward Waverley meets a figure from history, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. Some works of fiction are slightly or greatly re-imagined based on some originally true story, or a reconstructed biography.[9] Often, even when the author claims the fictional story is basically true, there may be artificial additions and subtractions from the true story to make it more interesting. One such example would be Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a series of historical fiction short stories about the Vietnam War.

Fictional works that explicitly involve supernatural, magical, or scientifically impossible elements are often classified under the genre of fantasy, including Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Creators of fantasy sometimes introduce imaginary creatures or beings such as dragons and fairies.[3]

Reality

Realistic fiction typically involves a story whose basic setting (time and location in the world) is real and whose events could feasibly happen in that real-world setting; non-realistic fiction involves a story where the opposite is the case, often being set in an entirely imaginary universe, an alternative history of the world other than that currently understood as true, or some other non-existent location or time-period, sometimes even presenting impossible technology or a defiance of the currently understood laws of nature.[10][11]

In terms of the traditional separation between fiction and non-fiction, the lines are now commonly understood as blurred, showing more overlap than mutual exclusion. Even fiction usually has elements of, or grounding in, truth. The distinction between the two may be best defined from the perspective of the audience, according to whom a work is regarded as non-fiction if its people, places, and events are all historically or factually real, while a work is regarded as fiction if it deviates from reality in any of those areas. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is further obscured by an understanding, on the one hand, that the truth can be presented through imaginary channels and constructions, while, on the other hand, imagination can just as well bring about significant conclusions about truth and reality.

Literary critic James Wood, argues that "fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude," meaning that it requires both creative invention as well as some acceptable degree of believability,[12] a notion often encapsulated in poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's term: willing suspension of disbelief. Also, infinite fictional possibilities themselves signal the impossibility of fully knowing reality, provocatively demonstrating that there is no criterion to measure constructs of reality.[13]

Formats

Traditionally, fiction includes novels, short stories, fables, legends, myths, fairy tales, epic and narrative poetry, plays, (including opera,) and various kinds of theatrical dancing), but it also encompasses comic books, and many animated cartoons, stop motions, animes, mangas, films, video games, radio programs, television programs (comedies and dramas), etc.

The Internet has had a major impact on the creation and distribution of fiction, calling into question the feasibility of copyright as a means to ensure royalties are paid to copyright holders.[14] Also, digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg make public domain texts more readily available. The combination of inexpensive home computers, the Internet and the creativity of its users has also led to new forms of fiction, such as interactive computer games or computer-generated comics. Countless forums for fan fiction can be found online, where loyal followers of specific fictional realms create and distribute derivative stories. The Internet is also used for the development of blog fiction, where a story is delivered through a blog either as flash fiction or serial blog, and collaborative fiction, where a story is written sequentially by different authors, or the entire text can be revised by anyone using a wiki.

Types of literary fiction in prose:[15]

See also

Notes

    References

    1. ↑ "fiction." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. 2015.
    2. ↑ Sageng, Fossheim, & Larsen (eds.) (2012). The Philosophy of Computer Games. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 186-187.
    3. 1 2 William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman A Handbook to Literature (7th edition). New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 212.
    4. ↑ "Definition of 'fiction'." Oxford English Dictionaries (online). Oxford University Press. 2015.
    5. ↑ Farner, Geir (2014). "Chapter 2: What is Literary Fiction?". Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
    6. ↑ Culler, Jonathan (2000). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 31. Non-fictional discourse is usually embedded in a context that tells you how to take it: an instruction manual, a newspaper report, a letter from a charity. The context of fiction, though, explicitly leaves open the question of what the fiction is really about. Reference to the world is not so much a property of literary [i.e. fictional] works as a function they are given by interpretation.
    7. ↑ Iftekharuddin, Frahat (ed.). (2003). The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 23.
    8. ↑ M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1999, p. 94.
    9. ↑ Whiteman, G.; Phillips, N. (13 December 2006). "The Role of Narrative Fiction and Semi-Fiction in Organizational Studies". ERIM Report Series Research in Management. ISSN 1566-5283. Retrieved 23 October 2009.
    10. ↑ Yet, as philosopher Stacie Friend explains, "in reading we take works of fiction, like works of non-fiction, to be about the real world—even if they invite us to imagine the world to be different from how it actually is. [Thus], imagining a storyworld does not mean directing one's imagining toward something other than the real world; it is instead a mental activity that involves constructing a complex representation of what a story portrays" (Friend, S., "The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming: ).
    11. ↑ The research of Weisberg and Goodstein (2009) — Weisberg, D.S. & Goodstein, J., What Belongs in a Fictional World?, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Vol.9, No.1, (March 2009), pp.69-78 — revealed that, despite not being specifically informed that, say, the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, had two legs, their subjects "consistently assumed that some real-world facts obtained in fiction, although they were sensitive to the kind of fact and the realism of the story" (Friend, forthcoming).
    12. ↑ Wood, James. 2008. How Fiction Works. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. p. xiii.
    13. ↑ George W. Young: Subversive Symmetry. Exploring the Fantastic in Mark 6:45-56. Brill, Leiden 1999, p. 98, 106-109. ISBN 90-04-11428-9
    14. ↑ Jones, Oliver. (2015). "Why Fan Fiction is the Future of Publishing." The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Company LLC.
    15. ↑ Milhorn, H. Thomas. (2006). Writing Genre Fiction: A Guide to the Craft. Universal Publishers: Boca Raton. p. 3-4.
    16. ↑ J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms (1992). London: Penguin Books, 1999, p.600.
    17. ↑ Heart of Darkness Novella by Conrad - Encyclopedia Britannica,

    Bibliography

    External links

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