FactGrid:The FactGrid Prose Fiction Project
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(Field of Research:Q195135) Early modern readers were expected to laugh about the medieval romances and legends that had flooded the European book market between the 1470 and 1570s with the arrival of the printing presses. One could enjoy “satirical romances” and shorter “novels” — “romances”, however, were from now onwards the most precarious production. The alternative was “literature”, the field of non-fictional learning.
Things began to change strangely in the course of the late 17th and early 18th centuries: The “belles lettres” had become an accepted part of “literature” in Paris, Amsterdam, London and Leipzig. And then, beginning in the 1750s we suddenly see the entire concept of learned “literature” succumbing to the rising tide of novels, plays and poetry, that asks to become the new chief subject matter of a more fashionable brand of literary criticism. Two decades later, in the 1770s and 1780s we are stepping into the new world of “national literatures” that are suddenly built on the fictional as the natural base of all literature.
How was this possible? How could the fictional move from the disrespected spheres of folklore and superstition through the fashionable realm of the international "belles lettres" into the centre of the new "literary" production that enters the school curricular in the course of the 19th century? Who steered this process? The market? New journals that created the new appreciation of the fictional? The nations as customers of the secular topic that could be interpreted and appreciated here? How did genres react in these processes — as containers of productions that could demand new debates and eventually the new appreciation of “literature proper"? Can we map individual developments? Can we quantify them? Did secondary discourses reflect them or did they create them? The FactGrid prose fiction project wants to enable researchers to interconnect, categorise and explore titles of their various research projects with the broader perspective on the European market — cooperatively and across the boundaries of our present philologies.
Database Queries
- All titles presently listed as "prose fiction" (1,448 entries as of 27 March 2021)
- All places of publication (without fictitious claims) map view / all the misleading statements
- Title page focus
- Genre/sujet
- Plot ingredient
- Protagonists