Rumi, did you ever exist?

Abstract

In the field of literature, novels and poetry are always profiting from some aspects of the reality, but they are also fantasy and imagination. Literary researchers and historians have posed historical truth in some novels as a matter of discussion. It may be so that some narrative works create images that we can take as real, though they are not, in the words of Lewis Taylor, an scholar talking about Ciro Alegría and Jose Maria Arguedas. In the present article an analysis of the proposals made by this critic will be presented, and also some approaches to the treatment of the real thing in the realm of fiction.