In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th-century novels that are in a style similar to magic realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. As M. H. Abrams wrote,

[Such novels] violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly effective—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.^[1]

Fabulating authors include Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass, Robert Coover, and Ishmael Reed.^[1]