It depends on what you mean by "fiction book." Different societies in different places developed their literary styles differently, so there's cases of history and myth being mixed together, or myth used as history, i.e. not held as fiction. Epic poems like the Iliad or Gilgamesh easily date back into antiquity and prehistory. Examples of long-form prose fiction can be found from Rome and Asia as early as the second century CE.

If you're asking more specifically about novels, it's a somewhat complicated question, as literary academia has something of a debate regarding a consensus definition on what actually constitutes a novel. However, the one I've always essentially been taught is: a fictional prose narrative of substantial length chronicling aspects of the history and life or lives of a character or characters, examining the ways in which they experience the world and the ways in which their experiences change them or fail to change them.

Assuming this definition of the novel, the generally held strongest contender is "The Tale of Genji" by Murasaki Shikibu, written in the early 11th century CE. It follows the life of Genji, a son of the Japanese emperor who is disinherited by his father and his subsequent struggle to return to honour and prominence, with a heavy focus on his romantic exploits along the way. The wiki article has a more detailed plot synopsis, and it has been translated into English several times, so it's fairly easily available in bookstores or online (if you do intend to actually read it, however, I recommend getting a version with annotations and historical background like the Penguin Classics version. It is extremely complicated to read out of its context without scholarly assistance).

There are other important entries to the development of the novel, especially from the European perspective. Beowulf (~8th century CE) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century CE) are both important forerunners, to say nothing of the myriad of romantic novellas that can became popular around the start of the 12th century and remained so for several centuries, but in particular, Don Quixote (1605CE, mentally unstable country gentleman rides around with his "squire" in pursuit of the glory and adventure of the tales of chivalry he reads) is considered the first European novel, and Robinson Crusoe (1719, the classic castaway story) the first English-language novel.

This answer is a very, very cursory overview of a broad field that touches on both literary and historical studies. I've focused on the novel generally here as its the medium I'm best equipped to speak to, but bear in mind that there are a lot of ways to interpret this question. The first pieces of fiction committed to paper are truly ancient. Even discounting poetry, prose fiction has a long and rich tradition that predates the concept of books (as does arguably the Tale of Gengi). This answer is also formed largely from course notes, but I'll recommend you some sources for digging more deeply into the topic.

• The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 by Steven Moore. Start here. This is an absolutely exhaustive discussion of the various genres and works of literature from around the world that contributed to the literary development of the modern novel. He covers everything I have in much greater depth, as well as the vastness that I haven't. Also check out this article he wrote for the Guardian around the time of the books publication. It gives a good sense of where his focus is and the scope of his undertaking, as well as serving as an interesting introduction to the world before the novel.
  
  
• Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach by Michael McKeon, editor. An anthology of literary thinkers on, as the title suggests, theory of the novel. This is definitely more literature-focused, it uses guys Northrop Frye and Mikhael Bakhtin - literary critics as opposed to historians - but they do reflect on some of the historical developments of the novel. Definitely Eurocentric, though.
  
  
• The Novel Before the Novel by Arthur Ray Heiserman, editor. You'll probably have to go to a university library for this one. Heiserman collects a variety of essays that are particularly focused on the development of prose fiction before the conventionally held first novels. Like McKeon, he is particularly concerned with Europe and the West, so stick with Moore for anything other.

haha I understand that feeling.

On the psychology/cognitive science/neuroscience side:

Stanislas Dehaene argues that learning to read rewires the brain by co-opting other capacities and essentially constructing a new neural network dedicated to processing written language. It's an interesting theory and a great book, but a little dense.

Raymond Mar has done a bunch of interesting work on fiction and empathy. Here's a link to most of his papers.

There's some research on how fiction more broadly can increase altruism:

Barraza, J. A., Alexander, V., Beavin, L. E., Terris, E. T., & Zak, P. J. (2015). The heart of the story: Peripheral physiology during narrative exposure predicts charitable giving. Biological Psychology, 105, 138-143. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.01.008

A more philosophical take - Martha Nussbaum on 'reading for life'.

Here are some books that take a bit of a general overview:

Lisa Zunshine - Why We Read

My own area is actually situating a lot of this research in an evolutionary context - looking at how and why we tell stories and what role they have served over longer timeframes. Here are some others that have written on the topic. I disagree with them in quite a few places, and I'm essentially arguing that we need to expand on their accounts, but there's a lot to agree with as well, and they're worth a read:

Brian Boyd - On The Origin of Stories

Ellen Spolsky - The Contracts of Fiction

Jonathon Gottschall - The Storytelling Animal

Let me know if there's any papers/books that you can't get access to, I have them all in PDF format and would be happy to forward you anything you're interested in reading that isn't available to you.

As to why I chose the topic, essentially I have a bit of a generalist educational background: I majored in philosophy, psychology, history/politics and english literature/creative writing as an undergraduate, and did a Master's in cognitive science and philosophy. I'm what you would most definitely refer to as over-educated, and I don't mean that in a good way - I have an Australian equivalent to a student loan that isn't pretty (although still much lower than what it would have cost me in the US!). So, I wanted a way of getting paid to read and think about all the areas I'm interested in - and it turns out writing about the evolution of fiction takes me across a whole range of disciplines and a whole range of research areas, including evolutionary biology/psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, literary theory, etc. That, and I guess I have always disagreed with the idea of art as simply escapism or entertainment and wanted to look at how important it has been, and continues to be, in shaping who we are and where we're going.

For learning Ancient Greek (as an autodidact), start by signing up for The Great Courses Plus and take the Ancient Greek course, taught by Hans-Friedrich Meuller:

Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language | The Great Courses Plus

You can sign up for a free trial on The Great Courses, for just long enough to complete the Greek course. But I think it’s totally worth paying for ALL of the content.

I recommend downloading the guidebook and doing ALL of the homework. Copy and paste the exercises into a Word doc and type out the answers/translations. Take the course as many times as you can for mastery.

I’ve created a couple of free courses on Memrise for Ancient Greek verbs that (I hope) people may find helpful. I use (my best attempt at) Modern Greek pronunciation. Audio can be disabled by anyone who has a problem with that. My Memrise account (Diachronix) has some other Modern Greek courses.

Paradigms of Ancient Greek Verbs

Principal Parts of Ancient Greek verbs

Professor Al Duncan produced an excellent series of Ancient Greek videos (on Youtube: Learn Attic Greek with Al Duncan - YouTube), which follows along the exercises in chapters 1–10 and 30–34 of Cynthia Shelmerdine’s Introduction to Greek.

That textbook is a bit error-prone, but it’s still pretty good for beginners. I recommend using it to follow along in Professor Duncan’s videos, at least until they cut off at chapter 10. But you’re on your own between chapters 11 and 29. Again, I recommend typing out ALL of the exercises.

The Athenaze Book 1 and Athenaze Book 2 are good self-study resources for intermediate learners, with a lot of excellent reading material. I also have a Memrise course for the vocabulary in these texbooks.

Athenaze: Book 1

Athenaze: Book 2

Leonard Muellner (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) has a Youtube series on Ancient Greek: Learn Ancient Greek, with Prof. Leonard Muellner - YouTube

Unfortunately the audio throughout most of this series is terrible. But if you manage to listen closely (and not fall asleep), it’s quite edifying. Meullner is a genius. The course follows along the Greek: An Intensive Course textbook by Hansen & Quinn. You could try getting that textbook and following along, but I would recommend this last. I just can’t imagine most people having the patience for it. And I’ve heard mixed reviews on Hansen & Quinn, which professor Meullner criticizes ad nauseam throughout his videos.

Another resource I really like is the online version of ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΙΚΗ ΤΗΣ ΑΡΧΑΙΑΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗΣ by ΟΙΚΟΝΟΜΟΥ. You can turn the audio in the bottom right and a robot reads it out-loud. It’s helpful to learn the grammatical terminology in Greek and, if you can manage reading demotic Greek, you can experience the way the Greeks approach Ancient Greek (and observe the notable differences). They have interesting grammatical category distinctions that we don’t have in the West, many of which are quite handy. But this textbook doesn’t have any engaging reading material, aside from bland descriptions of the language. So it’s not for everyone.

Most other learning material I could recommend is mentioned in the various links above. But here are some key items for building a collection of self-study material:

*Geoffrey Horrocks’ “Greek - A History of the Language and Its Speakers” (MUST READ)

Plato: A Transitional Reader

Kaegi’s Greek Grammar

Smyth’s Greek Grammar

Plato Apology

Homeric Greek - A Book for Beginners

Rouse’s Greek Boy - A Reader

Basics of Biblical Greek

A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek

Geoffrey Steadman’s Ancient Greek reader SERIES

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

I think there is a difficulty in using the term "digital historian" or "digital humanities," because, like you suggest, it's unclear what that means. Does it in fact refer to a new field? Or, new tools to approach history? Or, as my post outlines, new outlets for historians to discuss their work? Or all three? "Digital historians" themselves have not agreed on a definition yet (at least as far as I've read), so in part the post was adding to that discussion by offering a new way of thinking about it. I see a lot of talk about the field and tools of a digital historian, and in a haphazard way, about "digital humanities" that seemingly encompasses whenever a liberal arts scholar touches on the "digital" in any way. It was partly written out of frustration as I don't see historians discussing the potential impact of "digital society" on the role and of our profession within that society. Instead we have concentrated on examining how it can change the tools we use to study of history, though to some, it does seem to imply a new field of history.

Despite your skepticism, I think the field of digital history is out there, but still being shaped into a coherent idea. At my home institution, the University of Waterloo, Ian Milligan is working on digital history projects. He's exploring how historians will look at society in the internet age and what tools they will have to do it. I know at University of Western Ontario, William Turkel is also doing digital history. I am sure there are others mirroring their work. Though the field is still being shaped by scholars like them, there is hints at a new field which examines the recent changes in our relation to and use of technology. Of course, I suppose this could just be explained as a new approach within the history of Information Society. I am not sure yet!

I am a bit hesitant about Big Data. From what I've read, there was a similar popularity about using computers back in the late 70s and early 80s to examine large amounts of data, and that did not result in a revolution in the field/profession. I don't think that's an area where we will see new, exciting ideas, but rather, as you suggest, old ones that have longer footnotes or more data backing them up. There are some directions that I find extremely interesting. Considering "video games" as sources of historical knowledge/memory and the methodology required to examine them; how society has conceived of information (though Information Society has had a journal since the 80s, it's stuff like Ann Blair's Too Much To Know that offers new ways of thinking about it); or methodology addressing how to use internet sources like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit and what they tell historians. I am a "contextual relativist" though, so I believe in reconstructing history as best as we can, so I am sure there are other ways of approaching digital history that I find less interesting to consider. There's a lot of room for methodological innovation and I am sure Big Data will cause some historiographical changes. I can't think of any big historiography change as a result of digital history, though I suspect we might see some soon enough.

What I think is most needed right now is a clarification and agreement about the terms we're using. Who knows if my post discusses "digital history," "digital humanities," or the "digital historian," or all of them. And who knows if "digital" means the same in each usage. I am trying to be a part of that discussion even if I am not yet giving clear answers. One day, perhaps! I really appreciate your comment, as this is exactly the sort of conversation we wanted to have through our blog.

How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

Yeah no worries happy to help, definitely PM me. I'm happy to offer you suggestions if that's useful to you.

If you're at all curious about the mechanics of what you're trying to work with your audience, it might help you to understand it based on brain science. The problem with forcing a symbol onto a character or a character into a symbol sets up a battle between your right and left hemispheres of the brain.

The right hemisphere lacks language so it largely works in meaning, symbols, images, and lives in the moment. The left hemisphere (specifically the portion behind your left eye) is constantly trying to generate a story of what it's seeing and make predictions of what will happen next based on what happened before. It also seems to contain language primarily.

So, in my opinion, symbols ideally should be generated by your right hemisphere which is responding to reality but unable to coin it words. From there, your left hemisphere should gather that up and codify it into a storyline. However, by trying to craft the symbol first, that's likely how you got a blockage. You're telling your left hemisphere to create the symbol which is disconnected by meaning because the left hemisphere doesn't really care if things are meaningful or not. It just wants to generate a story to cover it's ass.

There's a good writeup about how they learned all of this mentioned in Jonathan Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal. Basically, in the early 1960s, a man's corpus callosum (the median between his two hemispheres) was severed and so his hemispheres couldn't talk to each other. Then, they gave the man a divider and began to show each of his eyes different things. So they might show his left eye a picture of chickens and his right eye a field of snow. They'd offer him objects and his immediate reaction came from his right hemisphere, so he'd grab a snow shovel. However, his left hemisphere had to justify why it had done that and so when questioned why he went for the snow shovel, he said "To pick up the chicken poop!"

The point is the right hemisphere is the center you want to trigger deeply in your audience. That's why peculiar symbols and mythic motifs stir people in deep ways. It's the right hemisphere that wants to swing a light saber for example, or responds to conversations in Tarantino films about food. The problem with a lot of screenplays is there's a lack of understanding of these core ideas and as a result, some people just let their left hemisphere generate story thread garbage that doesn't really make sense or work.

Now that's not to say that you have to have an insane understanding of symbolism to write a good screenplay. You don't. We all understand these things deeply in our own right hemispheres. You should, however, be aiming to be inspired by your own deeper meaningfulness but also willing to share your ideas with others to polish your storytelling. This is why oral storytellers are constantly re-working their stories.

The shortcut of course, is to utilize standard mythological motifs. However, there's problems with this as anyone who learned Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey can see. Just because you're using a mythological motif doesn't mean you're utilizing meaningful symbolism. The Hero's Journey is a collection of 12 or so motifs that Campbell saw. Well those aren't the only motifs out there. Vladimir Propp's version has about 31 core motifs (he calls functions) and Stith Thompson's collection has over 46,000 motifs and are quite useful for story generation if you develop an eye for updating old storyforms. (I've done quite a few story creation experiments using Thompson's stuff).

If you don't work from an understanding of meaning and symbolism, it's like creating a person whose bones are all dislocated from each other and therefore can't move. If your story can't move, it definitely can't move your audience. You need meaningful symbolism to pull that off, and it doesn't take much to be honest. Stanley Kubrick would write his films around 6 to 8 meaningful symbolic ideas, which he termed "non submersible units" and then craft the story around that. Ray Bradbury in his book Zen in the Art of Writing describes hiding meaningful moments from his childhood into his stories in order to give them soul as well. You get the idea.

Yes, but you have to understand that it is very different from all of the more "modern" fantasies that have stolen from it. It is also very different from the movies. So it will be in many ways nothing like the fantasies you have read and liked. Tolkien was a scholar of ancient languages and legends. He could make up languages that were actually like real languages. In some ways LOTR is more like Beowulf than WOT or the like. LOTR is one of the world's great books. In a class with Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Goethe. A lot of people read scifi and fantasy because they don't read that stuff (me too, I'm not criticizing). So if you are going to say LOTR is too different from what I'm used to and I don't like it, then don't bother. But it is a great read if you can get into it.

I first read LOTR almost 50 years ago and it is impossible give you a sense of how different and strange it was. There was nothing like it before. Of course, every fantasy since has copied it in many ways. Even the LOTR movies are modern, a lot of special effects vaguely tied together by a plot that is less important than the special effects, and in that sense nothing at all like the books. But no later fantasy can copy the mythic structure, the languages, the peoples, all as rich as real.

Off on a tangent, and not a recommendation for the OP, the Real Middle Earth is a book LOTR (book, not movies) fans might want to read. It's about the middle ages, stuff we've all forgotten but Tolkien knew and loved.

Looking at the early usages of an idea is always an interesting way to first approach that term. You get to see how the idea, in this case metafiction, was first handled in literature and how that idea developed as it was used by different writers in different periods all with different cultural / literary agendas.

So, here are a couple of early examples of metafictional literature:

• The Canterbury Tales: the narrative frame constantly, by its nature, alludes to itself as a piece of writing. The speakers frequently mention how they are telling a tale and why they are telling that tale.
  
• Don Quixote: the hero of the novel reads so many novels he decided to try and enact those novels. There are many scenes where the speaker would alert the reader to the fact they are also reading one such novel.
  
• Shakespeare: There are quite a few moments in Shakespeare where a character addresses the audience and reminds them that they are watching a play. Some of the best examples are the play-within-a-play moments, such as in Hamlet. These are moments where the play meditates on what it means to be acting or watching a play. We might better call this technique metatheatre.
  
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: If you say pre-postmodernist metafiction this is the novel that most people will think of. It is metafictional is every single sense of the word. Constantly referring back to its own writing process, layering of narratives, etc etc.
  
• Melville's The Confidence Man. This short story discusses how literary techniques are used in earlier chapters.
  
  Then we have postmodernism itself, the literary period that this term is synonymous with. The reason why it is much more important as a critical term here, even though it was being used earlier, is that metafiction for the postmoderns comes to be used as way of interrogating one's philosophical relationship with the world. It is much, much more than the playful layering of narrative that is usually was prior to postmodernism. It came to be for the postmoderns a meditation about how we know something, how we are able to read and write and what the point of those activites are. It was also used to dislodge the idea that there existed some kind of absolute and universal truth. Reality was a construct, a discourse and metafiction highlighted this better than most other techniques.
  
  So, some of the big names in postmodern metafiction:
  
  
• Anything by John Barth
  
• John Fowles
  
• The People of Paper
  
• House of Leaves
  
• Flann O'Brien (not really postmodern, on the cusp of postmodernism)
  
• Brecht (same as above)
  
• Pale Fire
  
• Mumbo Jumbo
  
• Crying of Lot 49
  
  EDIT: Just re-read your question and see that you are more interested in a history of the term and not so much its literary manifestations. Start with an etymological dictionary. This one is very good: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Oxford-Dictionary-English-Etymology/dp/0198611129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369152716&sr=8-1&keywords=etymology+dictionary.
  
  There are also a couple of very good books that look at metafiction and that also go into the term's history. For example
  
  
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metafiction-Practice-Self-Conscious-Fiction-Accents/dp/0415030064/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369152738&sr=1-1&keywords=metafiction
  
  
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metafiction-Longman-Critical-Readers-Currie/dp/0582212928/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369152738&sr=1-3&keywords=metafiction
  

Ran said:
> It's a fun metaphor, but to buy into it I'd have to see examples of how the old myths had symbiotic interconnections like species in an ecology, and how the new myths don't.

I will try to expand more and make the parallels further, symbiosis makes sure that not only there will be organisms that will be better adapted for its niche but that they can approach tougher niches, this way different organism fill as much as possible of the living-space.
 
 

Compare that what the organism of a mono-crop becomes: a product, and a product means that his life purpose is to get the attention of the buyer and be consumed as fast as possible.
 
 

If we take a simpler definition that for organisms symbiosis is a mutual improvement in life. For an ecological Mythos(world of myth) we would have a kind of synergy(symbiosis) that improves in meaning for each other.
 
 

From my experience with folklore, Hindu and budhist myths, ortodox christian myths I have a gut feeling that myths improve each other inside these traditions and myths don't get obsolete but just enhanced. Even with that experience I don't have the erudition nor the space to expand this with examples and an exposition.
Keeping the ecological metaphor is harder to see how well was a place ecology until that place is destroyed.
Since is harder to show this synergy(symbiosis) with older myths I will try to appeal to your experience with the modern incarnations of myths: the meme and the mono-myth.
 
 

The meme has the same shelf-life like any product and it competes for immediate attention, it is a modern myth by many arguments and in even in theory and in practice they are found to be selfish and replicate at the detriment of other memes or the bigger picture.
 
 

More reading on mono-myth critique, an ecology of myths and integral(hollistic) "mythos":
 
 

Giambattista Vico (1668—1744)

Wandering God: Morris Berman

Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin
 
 

McLuhan's book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Classical-Trivium-Thomas-Learning/dp/1584230673

He was pretty young when he did this one, his specialty still teaching literature.

The McLuhan that knew Leary and Watts was decades later, after McLuhan had made a name for himself as founder of a department of technogy and communications at a university in Toronto. He was invited to an academic post in New York, but refused it.

One way to control the media is to own it. And the viewership numbers for a lot of traditional media outlets is in free fall.

I am sure that McLuhan, Watts, and Leary consulted with each other. Leary saw some stuff he was not supposed to see regarding the JFK assasination and was lucky to have lived. McLuhan lived on happily in his head. Watts had reason to be a little depressed at the end, but he had had a good run.

McLuhan hated new age stuff, privately. But he had some fun with the electronic and psychedelic styles, maybe even with hallucinogens, their affect on time and perception. He was fascinated with perception. How technology alters it. One way or other, intelligence departments would have been picking his brain. I know he consulted the Canadian government as well. He was a loyal Canadian, and a declared Catholic. But he did not trust what he called the gnostic influence in literature that affected TS Elliot and others.

I had to really focus to get McLuhan. It wasn't easy. I had to read and re read. What it left me with though is a deeper appreciation of how the way we get our information, by hearing, by reading, over the web, does change the way we process the information. Years ago the intellectual class was so much more linear and so much more oriented towards incrementalism. The preliterate world was also a very different world. Now, we are straddling. And its chaotic with the only efficient spots being places where the Apples, the Elon Musks, the Bransons hang out. Academia has become incredibly inefficient in delivering good information. Bureaucracies are in chaos. Much will be bypassed by new information technology. A lot of apparent success these days is not efficiency but corruption by government favoritism.

Have you seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khhsboVsyrw

Kind of a strange side note.

Hello there, first time posting in this sub. I have been reading, learning and following tips here for quite awhile. Ok, onto the book:

Narrative Madness, free (until Monday 12/21, $4.99 regular)

> NM is a nonfiction title and a Master thesis about how our perception of reality is shaped by stories. Our lives, just like Don Quixote, are influenced by the books we read, the stories we are told and all the narrative of media that surround us.


I know that most people here are interested in fiction, but I thought I'd share the book anyways. After reading posts in /r/selfpublish/, I decided to follow some advice:

• join KDP Select
  
• put my book on sale for free as a promotion
  
• optimized the title by adding a subtitle, and
  
• refined the categories the book was listed to rank higher in Amazon listings.
  
  
  I really learned a lot from all I've read in this sub these last months. Any additional advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
  
  (Edit: formatting)

If you're a Nick Hornby fan, here's what you should do - he's got three books that are little collections of the column he writes for The Believer called "Stuff I've Been Reading". They're hilarious, and each one gives you 5 or 6 great suggestions from a guy whose taste is pretty solid.

Start with The Polysyllabic Spree and then go to Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

He's always saying his favourite author is Anne Tyler - I can corroborate, she's pretty good.

This isn't really "literature" but you also might like Mil Millington. He's funny in the same way and even though as I'm reading I'm like "huh.. this isn't that great" his novels are the ones that I end up reading in one 8 hour sitting.

You might like David Sedaris - I'd start with Me Talk Pretty One Day

And someone else said John Irving - he's my very favourite.

A good psychology book (and I'm a major layperson, so it's definitely accessible) is The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Mad in America by Robert Whitaker.

Dating handwriting is a difficult thing, but, the important thing here is the presence of some characters from 'secretary' hand. (Look at the 'Secretarie Alphabete here http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/alphabets.html ). In general, you'll find secretary forms being used very commonly up to the 1630s or 40s, and less universally (but still often) in the later decades of the 17th Century. It would be very unusual to see it at all in the 18C. The main conclusion you can make is that the annotator was most likely roughly contemporary with the printing - getting more solid than that would be a chore. And I think a quill would at this point would be correct; wikipedia says fountain pens are starting to get used, but I still think it's most common to make your own quill and ink. (Check this out for more detail http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Writing-Implements-Age-Quill/dp/1872477003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010783&sr=8-1&keywords=western+writing+implements ) .

Ah, so h e and r don't stand for anything - it's just that they are some of the letters that have a more distinctive 'secretary' style.

I think (and I might be wrong) that one of the reasons such books survive because the common quality of paper back then was just so much higher than it is now, at least in big print-runs. Whereas a modern paperback would go brittle and yellow in less than a decade, that just doesn't happen so quickly with early modern books.

The whole idea of renaissance annotation has been a big growth industry, (at least within academia!) in recent years. Here's a book on the subject that's genuinely interesting http://www.amazon.co.uk/Used-Books-Material-Texts-ebook/dp/B00DPBKJWK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010543&sr=8-1&keywords=used+books+sherman .

It's pretty rare to see posts or queries on here that I'm equipped to answer with anything resembling specialist knowledge, so I guess it's just nice to have the opportunity to be useful! Rare books are kind of difficult to get a working knowledge of without prolonged exposure to them, and not everyone has had that opportunity.

The "new" textbook is, in some ways, a very double-edged sword. It offers a lot of benefits, but at times I'm afraid it does so at the expense of real growth in thinking on the part of my students. It lets them get to the quick of the issue faster, but I worry that by removing the hurdles of learning to analyze and parse text critically (who needs to do that? There's a commentary or a link that will just tell me the 'answer'...), we do them a great disservice. Sven Birkerts notes as much in The Gutenberg Elegies. He even addresses the Perseus Project directly as a point of concern. The tools are definitely a boon for those individuals advanced enough in their learning to use them judiciously, but what happens when they become a quick end-around for actually mastering basic material? I'm a huge fan of the digital humanities, but at times I think we're rushing forward for the sake of being able to do so and without consideration for what sacrifices we make in order to obtain our gains. All very interesting questions though. That's for sure.

Not sure about sites online that have that, but the book Elegant Complexity does a decent job at looking at chapter themes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002H9VXQC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

>Elegant Complexity is the first critical work to provide detailed and thorough commentary on each of the 192 sections of David Foster Wallace's masterful Infinite Jest. No other commentary on Infinite Jest recognizes that Wallace clearly divided the book into 28 chapters that are thematically unified. A chronology at the end of the study reorders each section of the novel into a sequential timeline that orients the reader and that could be used to support a chronological reading of the novel. Other helpful reference materials include a thematic outline, more chronologies, a map of one the novel's settings, lists of characters grouped by association, and an indexed list of references. Elegant Complexity orients the reader at the beginning of each section and keeps commentary separate for those readers who only want orientation. The researcher looking for specific characters or themes is provided a key at the beginning of each commentary. Carlisle explains the novel's complex plot threads (and discrepancies) with expert insight and clear commentary. The book is 99% spoiler-free for first-time readers of Infinite Jest.

As @snickersnacks said, we are in proof of concept stage, so there is a lot of work to be done on research and developing the best ways to help parents and kids. While interested parents like you are going to be our most valuable resource, a couple of sources have been helpful and interesting as a starting point for research:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/06/usa.politics

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Matters-Research-Libraries-Community/dp/1591580668

http://www.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/swf/i/Reading_for_pleasure.swf

Thanks so much for your feedback! Any other thoughts you on presentation or background as a parent would be much appreciated.

Oh man. Where do I begin?

It started with Edward Feser. Then Aquinas.

I recently compiled my 'short list' of books that were foundational for a Master's:

Start here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764807188/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019925995X/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Then go here:

https://www.amazon.com/Story-Christianity-Vol-Church-Reformation/dp/006185588X

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061855898/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=T5D86TV1MTCSQAYZ4GHR

G.K. Chesterton is always a good supplement (Heretics and Orthodoxy):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ALKPW4S/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Bible Study:

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Testament-Anchor-Reference-Library/dp/0385247672/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477868333&sr=1-1&keywords=raymond+brown

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585169420/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809147807/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

(Jewish perspective on NT): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195297709/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

After you've gotten through these (or maybe interspersed), get into de Chardin -- but be careful, because he toes the line into heresy with the noosphere stuff.

Then, start reading the theoretical physicist priests in our faith, Stanley Jaki, for example.

And this. This.

Finally, try to muddle through Spitzer. These guys have more smarts in their little finger than I will ever have.

Edit: I refreshed the thread and saw that you've already found Feser. Excellent. Are you familiar with John C. Wright as well? Sci-fi-writer-former-atheist-now-traditionalist-Catholic.

I'm interested in any science + metaphysics books you've come across too. . .

I wouldn't call it definitive, but I'm pretty sure that in his book Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Greg Carlisle posits several thematic-type things that unify the various shorter sections in chapters with circle headings.

I'll give you a few suggestions based on what I've read.

A good introductory book that covers many different literary theories is Peter Barry's Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Theory-Introduction-Literary-Cultural/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452013996&sr=8-1&keywords=beginning+theory). His chapters on Cultural Studies and New Historicism, as well as the other chapters, are very accessible.

Robert Dale Parker's How To Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (http://www.amazon.com/How-Interpret-Literature-Critical-Literary/dp/0199331162/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014126&sr=8-8&keywords=cultural+studies) focuses on major literary movements since the 1930s, and it is one of the more accessible books about the newer forms of literary theory.

Catherine Gallagher's Practicing New Historicism (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-New-Historicism-Catherine-Gallagher/dp/0226279359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014436&sr=8-1&keywords=new+historicism) is an excellent and easy-to-follow-without-being-condescending introduction to this area of literary theory.

This book talks about the evolutionary purposes of storytelling - why do humans really need to tell stories? and why do we like them so much? It doesn't make sense from a typical evolutionary standpoint - it doesn't protect us or get us food directly.

Gottschall quotes some research that says that storytelling might have been kept around evolutionarily as a way to show off to mates.

Sometimes when I feel inclined to growl, it comes out in the mildest statements made by Marxists.

Alas. I'm not quite Canadian enough to believe Marshall McLuhan's arguments are organized enough to qualify as human speech (or writing), and further don't have the energy to paraphrase his argument.

And nobody knows who Thomas Nashe is anymore, and to a certain extent that is a good thing. Same with Thomas Wolfe (if you're a fan, I'm very sorry).

Those are questions with many different and widely debated answers. This book by Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History, and this one by Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, are two fine resources. Parker's book is a little more basic and introductory.

I hope that helps.

Forsitan Rouse's Greek Boy te adiuvet, amice/a.

日本語版はないみたいけど、英語が読めるならこれをお勧め

http://www.amazon.co.jp/Storytelling-Animal-Stories-Make-Human/dp/0544002342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426978550&sr=8-1&keywords=the+storytelling+animal　

The Storytelling Animal?

Sure, here it is! The independent poems in this all seem to be formatted correctly, just the ones in novels are messed up - I read Ballad of the White Horse with no problem.