The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find out how and why the 'poetics of fiction' arose, its sources, and the materials from which it was created. A series of cultural choices made in archaic and classical Greece produced a clash between the traditional 'poetics of truth', which derived poetry from divine inspiration and in the last analysis did not construe the poem as a work of art at all, and the new 'poetics of fiction', which derived poetry from art. The eventual succession of the latter, culminating with the Poetics of Aristotle, amounted to an aesthetic revolution because, as a result of it, literary fiction, which since then has become a necessary framework for both the theory and practice of literature in Western tradition, was for the first time separated from non-fiction and given a status of its own.