Socratic dialogues - fiction or nonfiction?

[Jud3The0bscure]

Hey everyone,

I'm working on a project where I have to find a piece of literature printed in Britain between 1500 and 1603, but it cannot be considered poetry, fiction, or drama. I chose "The Defence of Good Women" by Thomas Elyot, and have spent quite a bit of time on the assignment all ready. However, the more I think about it, the more concerned I become that it would be considered a piece of fiction. It's 95% dialectics, set up the same way of many of Plato's Socratic dialogues, but the two people who are arguing are fictional, and of course, the argument itself never took place in real life, but there is little to no actually action or plot or other fictional elements. Should I still consider it fiction?

Here's the actual text: http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/elyot.html

: ( I really don't want to start over, it took me a long time to find a remotely suitable text.

[mal4mac]

If the characters are fictional, then it's fiction. There is nothing to say that fiction has to have action, plot, or anything...

Plato's dialogues, though, occupy an interesting space between fiction and non-fiction. Several of the earlier dialogues are thought to be (almost) factual records of conversations between Socrates and his friends, but in later ones Plato is often accused of using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own views. So the factual/fictional "ratio of Socratic reality" varies between dialogues. (And there is too little evidence to know the exact ratios...)

Can you find any evidence that Elyot's women actually existed and that he was (mostly) recording their conversations?

Otherwise, why not dig out some historical texts? For example, Raphael Holinshed (1529–1580), the English chronicler whose work was one of the major sources used by William Shakespeare for a number of his plays.

[Whifflingpin]

"If the characters are fictional, then it's fiction. "
Not necessarily. Instructional works were often presented as dialogues between 2 or 3 "characters" holding the role of teacher/pupil. Language text books still, in many cases (npi,) incorporate characters who encounter different situations throughout the book, purely to provide interesting examples of the the subject matter.

Such books would not be regarded as fiction.