Sourced here, but the artist is uncredted, sorry.
One of the more interesting discoveries I made doing "English" was how self-aware the first 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 told it to them, or about how they fell asleep and dreamt it. I loved being carried over the threshold like this. It inspired the creation of Laika as a narrator for Time Spanner, and definitely endeared me to the shunt ethos that a show begins as soon as the venue is entered (whether anything's happening or not). Subsequent traditions however decided that this quarantine between the real world and the world of the work was a waste of time, and self-awareness became considered self-indulgent, or "meta-textual", but it absolutely used to be the norm.
The post-medieval Don Quixote - one of the first novels - purported to be the story of a real man, which meant a lot of Volume 2 had to be spent with Quixote dealing with the fallout from the publication of Volume 1 (UPDATE: like Borat.) I'm sure this wouldn't have seen self-indulgent in 1605. The point of the book was that Don Quixote existed against his will in the real world, a world which therefore would also contain the book.
I'm probably not the only one who wondered as a kid what the characters in Eastenders watched on BBC1 at 7:30pm.
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