Fiction, from the Latin fingere to create, fictum created, is anything imaginatively invented, a feigned existence, event, or state of things. In a second more concrete and basically 20th-century meaning fiction has become the general term uniting all the literary genres that developed with the modern novel. The reference is made here in a tripartite spectrum of genres with drama and poetry as the two essential alternatives.

The word has made since the 14th century a steady career with the field of invented histories, basically novels and romances. Up to the 17th century it stood for feigned, invented, untrue histories, designed (so the advocates of poetic fictions who referred to Horace's poetics) both to instruct and to delight. The cultural evaluation of fiction changed gradually from the 1670s into the 1790s: Art, traditionally the field of human invention (including machines and instruments) was reduced to a field of works created with a deeper significance and higher beauty.

The entire field was in the same process connected to the production of allegedly valuable fictions (as opposed to lies and escapist romantic dream worlds). The essential idea was from the mid 18th century onwards that art depicted reality following though a process of transformation in which the work of art gained a deeper significance, aspects of a fundamental and universally applicable truth, a higher and sublime beauty. Fiction became in this process an essential quality and feature of the work of art.

The development towards fiction as a field of literary genres took place in English (other languages developed different concepts to organise the market) in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Fiction became here the field of narrative literary prose genres with genres such as novel, romance, short story, novella, or crime fiction, fantasy, science fiction. The word has here the function to continue the previous segmentation of "poetic genres" which used to comprise the three essential productions of dramatic, epic and lyrical poetry.

The older poetical system excluded prose fictions — the new system of "literary" rather than "poetic" genres includes them under the term "fiction". Fictionality is in the new system at the same moment an aspect all works of literature can share (a play can thus share the fictional settings, characters, the fictional plot line with a novel).

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