In the late 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg of Europe created an epoch-making invention: the movable-type printing press. This invention fundamentally transformed the landscape of information in Europe, breaking the church’s and higher authorities’ monopoly on knowledge and thought, and opening space for the free development of science. People began to put their faith in science, and growing doubt toward God gradually shifted the forms that literature took. Classical works—Beowulf, the Bible, the Divine Comedy—were rooted in the beliefs of their own times, composed largely in long verse, celebrating grand ideals and imagined worlds. After the press became widespread, literature underwent a visible shift in focus from the divine and supernatural to the human: protagonists moved from figures like Beowulf, Jesus, and Odysseus to historical persons like Julius Caesar and Richard III. Settings, too, began to connect to the real world—Hamlet, for instance, is set in England during its transition from feudalism to capitalism. Moving further toward the modern, the traditional modes of literary narration and the themes emphasized within them changed further still.
In the mid-19th century, the flourishing of capitalism and the rapid advance of the Industrial Revolution produced another major transformation in social structure, giving rise to realism—a literature that valued accurate, objective depiction of social life. Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich gives a detailed account of an ordinary bureaucrat’s life and death. In it, Ivan Ilyich’s fear of dying is peeled back layer by layer; through his psychology, Tolstoy critiques the hypocrisy of the Russian bureaucratic system and the way people live, laying everything bare under death’s vast, black-hole trembling. By the end, Ivan Ilyich’s understanding of life has been utterly overturned.
In the 20th century, modernism was born, and stream-of-consciousness writing—the most direct expression of inner emotion and mental state—began to emerge. As urbanization advanced, more and more people came to know the powerlessness, loneliness, bewilderment, and monotony of city life. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is an epic modernist work of vast scope (though not an epic in form), saturated with complex association, interior monologue, and metaphor; the reader can enter deep into the protagonist’s inner world and experience his emotions and processes of thought. The novel’s themes of love, time, memory, art, and life are tied to the life and manners of the French upper classes—not to God, redemption, faith, or sin—reflecting literature’s growing attention to humanity itself and social reality.
Over time, literary language saw more and more innovation. Borges’s nonlinear narrative and deep philosophical resonance in The Garden of Forking Paths produced a writing where “his prose reads like fiction; his fiction is poetry; his poetry often feels like prose—thought is the bridge between all three.” César Aira transplants the sci-fi plot of a pulp film into serious literature in The Literary Conference, creating work “full of surrealist dramatic effect while probing the human predicament—attempting to use language to resist the loneliness of living at the margins of modern society, and the anxiety of facing an unknowable, uncontrollable future.” 1 Olga Tokarczuk, in Flights, deploys a fragmented mode of narration to match a 21st-century life increasingly chaotic and fractured under the development of the internet. And finally, light-novel writers represented by Nisio Isin, Kinoko Nasu, and Tomihiko Morimi have used compact plotting and precise command of popular culture to put literature in active conversation with multimedia—illustration, manga, animation, online promotion—opening new possibilities for how fiction presents itself.
Just as ancient Europeans carried the Bible and ancient Chinese read Water Margin, as society enters the postmodern, literature as an art form for expressing thought and feeling continues to expand its modes of presentation. The era that made The Catcher in the Rye a sensation has passed; literature is no longer confined to traditional ways of telling stories, and has become more diverse and innovative. In the future we may see more fusions of literature and multimedia—like the chapter divisions in films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel or Pulp Fiction, or the passages in the novel Bakemonogatari that simulate animated storyboards. Perhaps, just as mainstream literature once shifted from poetry to the novel, a newer form of literary or artistic expression will replace the novel as literature’s dominant mode—or perhaps the novel will remain as the primary haunt of literature, appearing as a ghost that never quite arrives in person.