'', which
Miguel de Cervantes claimed was translated from an Arabic text by the nonexistent
Cide Hamete Benengeli. According to
L. Sprague de Camp, the earliest known example of a
fictional book would be the
Book of Thoth, an alleged holy or magical text from the era of
Ancient Egypt, mentioned in a tale from that period ("
Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire").'
and Gothic fiction. In the former, it has been popularized by James Macpherson, and his Ossian'' poems (a series that debuted in 1761), which he claimed were based on his translation of purported "ancient poetry" in his possession. In the latter, for example,
Horace Walpole's 1764 novel
The Castle of Otranto, which also established Gothic fiction as a
genre, purported to be a translation of an older Italian manuscript from the era of the
Crusades. The process has spread to many other regions and genres, such as
early American literature – for example, the claim that the story is based on allegedly existing documents inherited by the author was present in the anonymous
The Female American (1767), while
Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that at least two of his works (
The Scarlet Letter [1850], and
The House of the Seven Gables [1851]) were based on manuscripts he found in various places. Another example, in the French language, is the 18th-century novel
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. In the 20th century, references to a large body of fictional literary works (most famously, the
Necronomicon) formed a major part of the
Cthulhu Mythos shared universe, begun by
H. P. Lovecraft.
Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita is prefaced by a fictitious
foreword from an editor of psychology books, and the novel is presented as the memoir of its protagonist, who writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. The trope has been adapted to modern media and is known as
found footage, popularized by the 1999 horror film and
pseudo-documentary The Blair Witch Project, and video games (such as 2015
Her Story or 2017
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard). == Analysis ==