[Freak_NL]

It's not that any specific particular work of fiction will provide really valuable insights — what is insightful to one reader may be obvious to another — but that the whole field changes and absorbs societal change and extrapolates and interprets society from there.

It means books get written now which explore perspectives and voices unheard before, which in turn can help us readers expand our frame of reference.

The collective works of fiction written before 1900 tend to reflect the societal viewpoints of well-off white men (even when written by women or specifically dealing with societal ills). Go a few decades beyond that and you see authors from a working class background join the chorus, then more women, a broadening of sexual themes reflecting society's change (feminism, sexual liberation, homosexuality, etc.), more open criticism of religion too. Digital technology changed society significantly, and this is of course reflected in writing from the more recent decades, and coming up towards today you see more and more diversity amongst authors, adding — through the characters and narratives they create — yet more perspectives and insights. Sometimes pushing the envelope of a specific field, sometimes getting rid of tropes which no longer convince. Fiction changes constantly and will always be rooted in the year it was written.

You sell yourself short if you stop at 1940.

[Amezarak]

Unique perspectives are not made by sex or skin color, but by life experiences.

Two Americans today, whatever their sex and race, have virtually everything in common with each other compared to anybody from 1800, let alone 800. The extreme, excessive focus on race and sex in contemporary writing is exactly what makes it boring and irrelevant. This comment is a great example - you've been taught by contemporary writing that such a tendency existed, when it in fact excludes the objective reality of the tons of works that could not have been said to be "written" or "about" such people even by modern framing, but also the fact that "well-off white man" is a completely meaningless and inapplicable phrase if you go back more than a couple centuries.

The sort of work you're describing is the stuff we're taught to acculturate us to the world we already live in. There's no point browbeating me with even more material that I am already steeped in.

[paulryanrogers]

> Two Americans today, whatever their sex and race, have virtually everything in common with each other compared to anybody from 1800, let alone 800.

Define "virtually everything"?

The rich, white, and men have had massively different resources and societal privileges in each of those eras.

Even today it seems obvious to me that to be rich or white or male each brings benefits at every stage of life which can drastically change ones life experience: food security, personal safety, education, job prospects, and romantic opportunities.

[Amezarak]

I mean that if you put a random 2024 white man and black woman in a room with Charlemagne and the ability to communicate, the former two would have 99% overlap in their worldviews and perspectives while Charlemagne would be an alien to them both. “Privilege”, as the ancients noted, is fleeting and superficial.

“White” is a modern social abstraction that rapidly breaks down the further back you try to apply it. It also carries with it loaded assumptions that do not really hold even at a population level in different places. This is exactly what I mean: immersing yourself in modern culture blinds you to the reality people did not and could not apply such categories because they did not even exist. People often repeat that race is a social construct but rarely think about what that really means.

People in past cultures were totally alien. There’s some substrate of common humanity but trying to say, apply modern racial privilege politics to Xenophon’s encounter with the very pale Paphlagonians, or the widespread trafficking of European slaves even into modernity in Northern Africa and Anatolia, or even into parts of colonial America is just nonsensical.

I mean, take this quote from Benjamin Franklin for example, which would have been early in the conception of modern race:

> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

This is a completely bizarre Martian take to any of us alive today. The past was a foreign country. If you just stamp your feet and repeat “all old books is just rich white men” you’re not only completely wrong but missing genuinely different perspectives.

As an aside, what does it mean to not have a reasonably good understanding, as a man, of a woman’s perspective in 2024? Did you have mother, sisters, or cousins? No friends or girlfriend or wife? No empathy? As a last resort never read mumsnet or 2X? Ignoring the fact that once again highlighting the sex differences ignores the fact there are literally four billion women and they all have different perspectives, they’re not a hive mind, if you have to read a book to figure out the common differences in perspective…hasn’t something really gone wrong in society for that to even be possible? And could a book by some woman you don’t know and had some kind of connections or very unique experience - she got published after all - really tell you more than having long and deep empathetic conversations with people you actually know?

Books are great because they’re a window into that we can never see for ourselves. Literally 50% of the people on Earth right now are a different sex. You can find out what they think right now with no effort. We don’t need the nth book on “what it’s like to be an X in America”, we all know, everyone is shouting it from the rooftops. I’d trade it all for more Sappho, and I’m a member of a minority group that could write my own What It’s Like to Be An X in America book.

[spookybones]

Sex and skin color most definitely influence unique experience (not exclusively of course). I guess you didn’t catch this in your readings of Shakespeare.