I used the same joke to illustrate much the same point in an academic paper last year, when I set out to poke holes in Rise of the Novel theories (the idea that the novel sprung fully formed from the foreheads of a few 18th century Englishmen, which ignores stuff like Don Quixote, The Golden Ass, and anything written by women at any time before 1750--or else dismissing such things as romances").