FactGrid:Prose fiction data model

All properties for publications

• all FactGrid properties for publications (Q77484)

• bibliographical core data (Q100931)
• contexts of other publications (genre, stemma etc.) (Q100932)
• language and content (Q77485)
• financial details on an edition (Q100933)
• fiction and dubious histories (Q221312)

Some notes on our specific properties for prose fiction and dubious histories

The early modern production of fiction (and dubious histories) was not only discredited by most contemporary scholars as baseless and scandalous if not downright dangerous and designed to delude. It was, at the same moment, statistically marginal and published often with a deliberate irresponsibility we should map. The following properties and statements give the basic options:

1. Quality of author identification Property:P561
2. Quality of place identification — Property:P562
3. Quality of publisher identification — Property:P564
4. Quality of date information — Property:P563

the following Items are prepared to complete the optional statements

1. "transparently stated" — Item:Q221316
2. "obviously misleading statement" — Item:Q221317
3. "misleading but plausible statement" — Item:Q221318
4. "without statement" — Item:Q221319
5. "states where sold, instead of specifying the place of production" — Item:Q221320
6. "publisher hides behind partners" — Item:Q221321

The shrouding of responsibilities reflects the low prestige of the production — this was not literature, learning, with its high prestige; just as it sheds light on the irresponsibility that was fueling the virulent market: fictional histories spread fashions to the delight of the young elites and it

Early modern prose fiction tended to be seen as a provocation of true history, the field that was taking trying its best to break with the traditions of medieval history, the sphere in which legends and fables had taken over.

Fiction was at the same moment ready to blend at the prestigious environment. Both spheres shared the established moralistic agenda: History was there to teach us, public history with the aim to address princes, politicians and nations.

The integration into the historical, apparent in practically all the contemporary catalogues, came in a model of two quintessential options to the left and to the right of the scheme below:

image positioning

		Item:Q221324 Heroical Romances: Fénelon's Telemach (1699)
Q221322 Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs: Manley's New Atalantis (1709)	Q221323 Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs: Menantes' Satyrischer Roman (1706)	Q221325 Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678)	Q221327 Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)	Q221323 Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention: La Guerre d'Espagne (1707)
		Q221326 Satirical Romances: Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)	from Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa (Amsterdam, 2001), p.194.

Authors and publishers could either pretend to offer simply "romantic" fiction, "feigned" histories - though histories that smelled of a historical truth to be decoded, keys were often be published separately to trigger the scandal. The alternative, on the other side of the spectrum, came with titles that denied the fictional contend and defended the historicity of the unbelievable account.

Both options depended on a centre of truly fictional titles to be read and to be enjoyed as fiction - here in a high and low division of "high" heroic performances on the top and "low" satirical on the bottom (not to be confused with the confrontation between elegant books of the belles lettres and the cheap production of chap books).

A central production existed in the heart of the spectrum: the production of modern "novels" that would, remaining in the sphere of fiction and authorial design, avoid the platitudes of the heroic genre and the cheap laughter of the satirical ridicule by focusing on normal protagonists who would act in intrigues rather than in heroic or satirical adventures.

The spectrum lives on with the genres it created whilst it succumbed to the modern differentiation