A fictional narrative

Fictionality is the feature most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. From a historical perspective it can be a problematic criterion. Authors of histories in narrative form throughout the early modern period would often include inventions that were rooted in traditional beliefs or that would embellish a passage or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore.
The line between history and novel can be defined in aesthetic terms: Novels are supposed to show qualities of literature and art. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed, however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private readers as a work of art.
Literary value is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel possess the "eternal qualities" of art, the "deeper meaning" revealed by critical interpretation? The debate itself has allowed critics to develop the investigation and meaning of texts marked as 'fiction'. The novel differentiated itself from the historical category of forgery by announcing in its form the design of the author. The word novel can appear on book covers and title pages; the artistic effort or suspense is prefigured for the reader in a preface or blurb. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. At its beginnings, this new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up to the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early-18th-century roman à clef and its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered narratives with – by and large scandalous – historical implications. Historians had discussed them with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic who became responsible for fictions in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personal narrative, heroes to identify with, fictional inventions, style and suspense – in short anything that might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity and artistic freedom. It may relate facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if it does not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works^[1] – it has to compete with works of art and invention, not with true histories.
Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past – the decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions both of artists and their readers.

Distinct literary prose

The first "romances" had been verse epics in the Romance language of southern France. Novel(la)s as those Geoffrey Chaucer presented in his The Canterbury Tales appeared in verse much later. A number of famous 19th-century fictional narratives such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824) and Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833) competed with the moderne prose novels of their time and employed verse. It is hence problematic to call prose a decisive criterion.^[2] Prose did, however, become the standard of the modern novel – thanks to a number of advantages it had over verse once the question of the carrier medium was solved.
Prose is easier to translate. As rather intimate and informal language prose won the market of European fiction in the 15th century, a time at which books first became widely available, and immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the traditions of verse narratives wherever an elevated style was needed. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that didn't aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.
This is for the early modern period closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature – but. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation, to the personal memoir and travelogue.^[3]
18th-century authors eventually criticized the France ideals of elegance the belles lettres had promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late-19th-century and early-20th-century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or traditionalists. The situation is – in a historical perspective – new: An awareness of traditions has only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670). It has reached the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.

Media requirements: Paper and print

The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be remembered with precision. Oral traditions had helped prose narrators with stock narrative patterns as employed in fairy tales^[4] and with complex plot structures, whose point they could only reach if they told the story correctly (the novels of Boccaccio and Chaucer share this mode of construction with modern jokes, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).
Extended prose fictions needed paper^{[citation needed]} to preserve their complex compositions. Parchment had been available before the 1450s^{[citation needed]}, but remained too expensive to be used for histories one would read as a private diversion. Parchment was used for prestigious and presentable volumes of verse epics their owners would have recited on festive occasions (see the Troilus and Criseyde illustration below). Prose was otherwise the language of scientific books. Parchments would in their case be bought by libraries. The situation changed in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries when prose legends became fashionable among the female urban elite. The fact that the new audience would read these books again and again for inspirational purposes legitimated the use of parchment in the private context.
The availability of paper as a carrier medium changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books one would not necessarily read twice, books one would buy exclusively for one's private diversion. The modern novel developed with the new carrier medium in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The arrival of the printed book pushed the generic development as it created a special tension between the privacy of the reading act and the publicity of the reading material that was sold in larger editions. The formats duodecimo and octavo (or small quarto in the case of chapbooks) immediately created books one could read privately at home or in public without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses or on journeys became part of the early modern reading culture.^[5] The reader who immerses him- or herself in the novel with the wish to stay undisturbed (or to be disturbed only with a look at his or her present reading) is here an early modern precursor of the modern commuter reading a novel or putting on head phones with the intention to stay private in the public. A special content matter immediately explored the new reading situations.

Special content: The novel's intricate intimacy

Whether in 11th-century Japan or 15th-century Europe, prose fiction tended to develop intimate reading situations. Verse epics had been recited to selected audiences (see the Troilus and Criseyde illustration below), a reception that had already allowed a greater intimacy than the performance of plays in theatres. The late medieval commercial manuscript production created a market of private books, yet it still required the customer to contact the professional copyist with the book he or she wanted to have copied (see the Melusine illustration below) – a situation that again restricted the development of more private reading experiences. The invention of the printing press anonymised the bookseller-text-reader constellation – the situation was especially interesting for prose fiction, a subject matter that remained publicly undiscussed almost throughout the early modern period. Booksellers and readers could pretend far into the 18th century not to know more about the particular title the new market of printed books provided. If one wanted to know what others read in novels one had to read them oneself. Prose fiction became in this situation the medium of open secrets, rumours, private and public gossip, a private, unscientific and irrelevant reading matter, yet one of public relevance as one could openly see that the book one was reading had reached the public as part of a larger edition.
Individualistic fashions, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels. Love became the typical field of experience romances and novels would focus on, as Huet noted in his early definition: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance".^[6] Satirical fictions widened the range of subject matter in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reader is invited to personally identify with the novel's characters (while historians are supposed to aim at neutrality and a public view on whatever they discuss).
The reviewing of fiction changed the situation for the fictional work in the course of the 18th century. It created a public discussion about what people were actually reading in novels. It had at the same moment the potential to divide the market into a sphere to be discussed and a low production critics would only hint at. The subcultures of trivial fiction and of genres to be sold under the counter with pornography as its most influential field followed the arrival of literary criticism in the 1740s and 1750s.

Length and the epic depiction of life

The requirement of length is contested – in English with greater ferocity than in other languages. It rests on the consensus that the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose (followed by the novella, novelette and short story and so on). The sequence has been unstable: 17th-century critics had handled the romance as the epic length performance and privileged the novel as its short rival.
The question how long a novel has to be – in order to be more than a novella – is of practical importance as most of the literary awards have developed a ranking system in which length is also a criterion of importance.^[7] The Booker Prize has thus aroused a serious debate with its 2007 listing of Ian McEwan's 166-page work On Chesil Beach. Critics immediately stated that McEwan had at best written a novella.^[8]
The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life".^[9] The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.

History

Etymology

The present English (and Spanish) word derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new".^[10] Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, Russian, Croatian, Romanian, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.
The English and Spanish decisions came with the 17th-century fashion of shorter exemplary histories. See the chapters "Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740 and The words "novel" and "romance" in the following.

The novel in other cultures

Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction

A significant number of extended fictional prose works predate the novel, and have been cited as its antecedents, but this is inaccurate. While these works match the European novel form and, often, substance, they and the European genre developed independently. The early European novelists were unaware of most of these works; instead they were influenced by novellas and verse epics.
Early works of extended fictional prose include the 6th/7th-century Daśakumāracarita by Daṇḍin, the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta, the 11th-century Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (or Philosophus Autodidactus, the 17th-century Latin title) by Ibn Tufail, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, and the 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong.
Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) shows essentially all the qualities for which works such as Marie de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678) have been praised: individuality of perception, an interest in character development and psychological observation. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels by the Ming dynasty. Parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed similar opportunities for composition and reception, allowing explorations of individualistic subject matter.
By contrast, Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy and theology. In this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel,^[11][12] while Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel.^[13] Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is also likely to have influenced Daniel Defoe with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island (the work was available in a new edition shortly before Defoe began his composition).^[14]

Antecedents of the European Novel

Western traditions of the modern novel reach back into the field of verse epics, though again not in an unbroken tradition. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (1300–1000 BC), Indian epics such as the Ramayana (400 BCE and 200 CE) and Mahabharata (4th century BC) were as unknown in early modern Europe as the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf (c. 750–1000 rediscovered in the late 18th century and early 19th century).
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (9th or 8th century BC), Virgil's Aeneid (29–19 BC) were read by Western scholars since the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 18th century, modern French prose translations brought Homer to a wider public, who accepted them as forerunners of the modern novel.^[15] Ancient prose narratives^[16] included a didactic strand with Plato's dialogs, a satirical with Petronius' Satyricon, the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass and a heroic production with the romances of Heliodorus and Longus.
It is less easy to define the traditions of short fictions that led to the medieval novella. Jokes would fall into the broad history of the "exemplary story" that gave rise to the more complex forms of novelistic story telling. The Bible is filled with similes and stories to be interpreted. Fiction is, as Pierre Daniel Huet noted in his Traitté de l'origine des romans in 1670, a rather universal phenomenon, and at the same moment one that lacks a single cause.

The medieval romance and its shorter rivals

Romances, 1000–1500

Main article: Romance (heroic literature)

Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel, which claims roots in the Italian novella.^[10] Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.
The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer's late-14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes, Dido and Aeneas, and Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and early 13th century.^[17] Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380–87) is a late example of this European fashion.
The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian histories became a fashion in the late 12th century, thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of Chrétien de Troyes set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes^[18] in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The model invited religious redefinitions with the quest and the adventure as basic plot elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire "coming towards you") were tests sent by God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry (and contemporary politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring (c. 1410).
The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur compilation of the early 1470s.
Several factors made prose increasingly attractive: this "low" style was less prone to potentially annoying exaggerations; it linked the popular plots to the field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect historical sources for the sole purpose of instruction and national edification^[19]). Prose had an additional advantage for translators, who could go directly for meaning, where verse had to be translated by people skilled as poets in the target language. And prose survived language changes: developments such as the Great vowel shift changed almost all the European languages during the 14th and 15th centuries. Copyists of prose had an easy job to deal with these shifts while those who copied verses saw that rhymes had broken and syllables got lost in almost every second line.
Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and 15th-century paintings of the annunciation show how far books had spread into the urban households that painters usually depicted as the blessed virgin's bourgeois environment.^[20]) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed histories in the 1470s.^[21]

The tradition of the novella, 1200–1600

Main article: Novella

The Pilgrims diverting each other with tales; woodcut from Caxton's 1486 edition of Canterbury Tales.

The term novel refers back to the production of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400).
The early modern genre conflict between "novels" and "romances" can be traced back to the 14th-century cycles. The standard scheme of stories the author claimed to have heard in a round of narrators promised variety of subject matter and it led to clashes of genres. Short romances appeared within the frame tales side by side with stories of the rivalling lower genres such as the fabliaux.^[22] Individual story tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafictional consideration.
The cycles themselves showed advantages over the production of rival extended epic-length romances. Romances presupposed a consensus in questions of style and heroism. The cycles shifted the problem of how fictions were to be justified onto the level of the individual storytellers: onto a level the author, Chaucer or Boccaccio, would see as out of his control.^[23] The narrators had, so Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales,^[24] offered these stories to make certain points in a lively conversation he had only chronicled. They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents had missed their points. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes the medieval collections, differing tastes of people with different social statuses were decisive; the different professions fought a battle over precedent with satirical plots designed to ridicule individuals of the opposing trades. A cycle bound rival stories together and it offered the easiest way to keep a critical distance. The pluralistic discourse created here eventually developed into the 17th- and 18th-century debate of fiction and its genres.
Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive whenever a short joke is told to make a certain humorous point in everyday conversation. The longer exploits left the sphere of oral traditions with the arrival of the printing press. The book eventually replaced the story teller and introduced the preface and the dedication as the paratexts in which the authors would continue the metafictional debate over the advantages of genres and the reasons why one published and read fictional stories.

Before literature: The early market of printed books, 1470–1720

1474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts.

Looking back to the scope of early modern histories, mentalities seem to differ. The Enlightenment seems to separate the 21st-century observer from early modern authors and readers of histories and fictions. The grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market. William Caxton's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1471) was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Witchcraft pervaded the medieval romance, which no one read as "romance" as long as it claimed to be a central text of Great Britain's national memory. Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, written in the 14th century, circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century,^[25] and was filled with natural wonders like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun – again without becoming the subject of critical historical debates. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of literature, fiction. The realm of history grew around 1700 into a field of comparatively sober argumentative rather than narrative projects.
One can interpret this development as a sign of gradual enlightenment. It stands at the same moment for a new arrangement of discourses the Western nations established beginning with the 1660s. History became in the Western world a secular platform on which all parties, religions, and institutions agree to settle questions of unresolved responsibilities. Debates of state and religion had a comparable importance until the beginning of the 18th century. A new positioning of the sciences and a general interest of the 19th-century nation states in controllable and pluralistic secular debates stand behind the process that found its breakthrough with the American and the French revolutions and the 19th-century unification of Germany.
The transformation of history from a narrative project designed to instruct and to delight into a platform of open controversies is the one larger process which redefined the place of prose fiction since the Middle Ages. The creation of "literature" as a compound of poetry and fiction is the other. The modern nations won with literature a second field of essentially pluralistic controversies in which the interpretation and collective appreciation of texts gained a new and wider importance.
Two major incidents fuelled the separation of historical and fictional literature in the 16th and 17th centuries. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge – the market of chapbooks. The more elegant production 17th- and 18th-century authors would propagate as the belles lettres – a market that would be neither low nor academic – defined its ideals of style in the course of the 17th century. It became the wider sphere in which the modern ensemble of "literary genres" of poetry and fiction gained greater cohesion in late 18th century. The second major development is fixed to a single title: The Spanish Amadis de Gaula, by García Montalvo became the first best-seller of modern fiction – a title one would soon be reluctant to accept as part of the elegant belles lettres. The Amadis eventually became the archetypical "romance" against which the modern novel unfolded its successful wider pattern of genres in the 17th century.

Trivializations: Chapbooks, 1470–1800

Main article: Chapbook

The invention of printing subjected the existing field of histories – whether allegedly true, romantic or novel – to a process of trivialization and commercialization. Romances had circulated in lavishly ornamented manuscripts to be read out to audiences. The printed book allowed a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose of silent reading. Abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends and collections of jests and fables were the principal historical subject matter.^[26] Offering suspense and stories the audience could accept as allegedly true, even if they were fantastic and unlikely, the new books reached the households of urban citizens and of country merchants who visited the cities as traders.

Deteriorated design: early-18th-century chapbook edition of The Honour of Chivalry, first published in 1598.

Literacy spread among the urban populations of Europe due to a number of factors:^[27] Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th centuries and had become customers of religious devotion. The Protestant Reformation enkindled propaganda and press wars that lasted into the 18th century. Broadsheets and newspapers became the new media of public information. The early modern customers would not necessarily be able to write, yet even writing skills spread among apprentices and women of the middle classes. Business owners were forced to adopt methods of written book-keeping and accounting. The personal letter became a favourite medium of communication among 17th-century men and women as many Dutch period paintings show. The prefaces, the escapist subject matter, and a number of satires on the early consumption of fiction show that cheap histories were especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes.^[28] Norris' and Bettesworth's 1719 edition of The Seven Famous Champions of Christendom – itself a mixture of legend and romance – ended with a look on the entire spectrum of books the publishers would provide in their shops on London Bridge, a famous location where those who left the city provided themselves with reading materials:

At the afore-mentioned Place, all Country Chapmen may be furnished with all Sorts of Bibles, Commonprayers, Testaments, Psalters, Primers and Horn-books; Likewise all Sorts of three Sheets Histories, Penny Histories, and Sermons; and Choice of new and old Ballads, at reasonable Rates.^[29]

François Rabelais Gargantua (1537).

The new market was disregarded by scholars. The texts were offered with promises of great erudition – to an audience that would not know to distinguish between erudition and the misleading advertisement. The subject matter was extremely conservative. The bestsellers of this market – books like Till Eulenspiegel, The Seven Wise Masters, Don Belianis of Greece, Dr. Faustus, The London Prentice, or Sir John Mandeville's Voyages – went through innumerable editions between 1500 and 1800. People bought these books because though they were everything but modern and fashionable; one wanted to have them, because they were the books everyone had heard of, books of an eternal value to be chosen if one was not too sure about one's abilities to judge. The prefaces exploited these insecurities praising the solid value of the old and well known titles.
The design of these books deteriorated. The texts were copied without much editorship. Standard woodcut illustrations were repeated, often even within a single book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The illustrations began to show peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks grew: Early-18th-century editions of 16th-century titles would mix woodcuts of 16th-century knights in armor with equally crude depictions 18th-century courtiers wearing wigs.
The early modern market divide that created a field of low chapbooks and an alternative market segment of expensive fashionable, elegant belles lettres can be traced back into the 1530s and 1540s. The Amadis and Rablais' Gargantua and Pantagruel were the most important publications that lead into this divide – both books that specifically addressed the new customers of popular histories. The Amadis was a multi volume fictional history of style, so the advertisements, and aroused a debate of style and elegance as it fanned the first reading craze on the market of printed fiction. Gargantua and Pantagruel had the design of the modern popular history only to satirize its stylistic achievements. The ensuing debate created a gap between "truly elegant" fictions and the conservative bulk of chapbooks. The market divide became especially visible with books that appeared on both markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: The low market eventually included abridgments of classy books from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615)^[30] to the mutilations of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which infuriated the author with their claim to offer the entire plot without the tedious reflections for but half the price.^[31]
The cheap abridgments openly addressed an audience that neither had the money nor the courage to buy books with engravings and fine print. The prefaces of the abridgements promised shorter sentences, more action and less reflection, and the title for half the money.^[32] The gradual differentiation between fact and fiction that affected the market of the belles lettres in the 17th and 18th centuries barely touched the low market. One could wonder whether the apprentices and peasants who read such books cared about the status King Arthur, St. George or Julius Caesar had in the historian's eye. William Caxton's preface to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) set the tone that would allow Sir John Mandeville's Voyages of the 1360s to continue to be published as a true account of Eastern wonders until the end of the 18th century.

Heroic romances of style and fashion, 1530–1720

The Amadis, Spanish edition of 1533

By the 1550s there existed a section of literature (scientific books) addressing the academic audience and a second market of books for the wider audience. The popular second market developed its own differentiation of class and style. While the lowest strata of chapbooks created an extremely conservative market its antagonist the elegant "belles lettres" showed a particular design aiming at educated readers of both sexes, though not necessarily at academics. The very term "belles lettres" spoke of the ambition to leave the field of low books and to reach the realm of the sciences, "literature", "les lettres". Polite literature, galante Wissenschaften (that is sciences addressing both sexes and all readers of taste) were the English and German terminological equivalents. The use of a French loan word belles lettres marked the international aspect of the development. The new market segment comprised poetry, memoirs, modern politics, books of fashion, journals, and such. Autobiographical memoirs, personal journals and prose fiction set the trend in the modern field as the genres that authors could most freely use for experiments of style and personal expression