On Nov 4, 2008, at 10:38 AM, Chris Miller wrote:
*Popular fiction from the 19th C. -- but anything earlier than
1800 ? (the
problem being -- literacy itself was not a popular activity)
There are three classics of Chinese popular fiction that go back
about 800
years -- but again -- you could almost say that anyone who could
read was from
a special class.
Does Miller mean *fiction*, i.e., stories? Or *written* fiction
(literacy being the act of reading and writing)? Furthermore, by
"popular," does he mean stories for or of the mass of people, as
distinct from, say, the clerical class or landed estate?
If he means literacy, per se, the reading of a written text, then his
domain of examples of *popular* texts of will peter out about 1439,
and the examples for the first century and a half after that date will
only include the fictitious stories collected in the Bible; Don
Quixote was written about 1604; Robinson Crusoe was published a
century later, as was Tristram Shandy, and other English novels.
HOWEVER, if by "popular fiction" he means any form of popular story-
telling, then he has to dial the Way-Back Machine to 800 BC in the
West, or thereabout, to the compilation of stories that comprise the
Iliad and Odyssey. And of course, there are many other examples of
popular literary works, such as the tragedies and comedies of Greece,
the great epics of El Cid, Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, Virgil's
Aeneid and Dante's Commedia, all of which preceded the invention of
printing; and then came such works as Decameron, Gargantua and
Pantagruel, and many others.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
