
Fiction vs. nonfiction – English literature's made-up divide - samclemens
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/fiction-nonfiction-english-literature-culture-writers-other-languages-stories
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aaron695
I call BS.

I know it's quaint to realise something 'normal' isn't normal and it makes for
a good just so story, but fiction and non-fiction seems like it's pretty
straight up going to happen in books, true or made up. A logical divide that
would cross cultures.

I suspect this is more about word play and translations and odd books stores
than a thing. Their evidence seems pretty thin but it's a nice story so
perhaps it doesn't matter.

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x1798DE
From Google n-gram, it seems to me like the idea of nonfiction is a modern
addition to English [1]. Since this roughly corresponds with the huge
explosion of communications technologies (as you'd probably expect, since once
information storage and transmission become cheap you need better ways to
categorize it), I wouldn't be surprised to find that in many languages you
just import the word as a loan from English rather than coming up with your
own word.

1\.
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=non+fiction&ye...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=non+fiction&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnon%20fiction%3B%2Cc0)

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cafard
It is a bit odd to lump so many different sorts of writing under "nonfiction":
history, mathematics, philosophy, biology, ...

Having said that, one comes to books marked "fiction" with very different
expectations. People have always found Ford Maddox Ford's reminiscences
uncomfortable because he made so much stuff up. One does not expect a memoir
to have minute accuracy--much is necessarily omitted. But there is a
difference between leaving things out and shifting emphases and making up
incidents that never happened.

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thescribe
I feel we would lose something without the ability to label and judge some
works against the truth.

