One of the more interesting discoveries I made studying "English" was how self-aware the first English fiction was: Medieval writers couldn't just launch into a story they knew to be untrue, they had to first tell you about the person they met who'd told it to them, or about how they'd fallen asleep and dreamt it. I loved being carried over the threshold like this. It probably inspired the creation of Laika as a narrator for Time Spanner, and it definitely endeared me to the shunt ethos that a show begins as soon as a venue is entered. However, subsequent traditions decided this quarantine between the real world and the world of the work was a waste of time, and self-awareness became considered self-indulgent and "meta-textual". But it absolutely used to be the norm.
The post-medieval, sixteenth-century-penned Don Quixote – one of the first novels – purports to be the story of a real man, which means a lot of its second half is spent with Quixote dealing with the fallout from the publication of its first half (UPDATE: like Borat) and I'm sure this wouldn't have seemed self-indulgent in 1605. The point of the book is that Don Quixote exists, against his will, in the real world, a world which also, therefore, contains this book.
I probably wasn't the only child who wondered as what characters in Eastenders watched on BBC1 at 7:30pm.
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