And people started publishing story cycles/collections.

At first I didn’t see the connection. Then it dawned on me. When one in three of your neighbors is dying, when your grandparents are dead, when your children are dead, when your priest has died,—suddenly you realize: your culture is passing away. Soon there will be none who recall the wisdom you have accumulated, none to laugh over oft-repeated family tales, none to share with you the sense of purpose that comes from a shared life-narrative and a common local mythology. In short, apocalyptic times push the consciousness of culture up above the whirlpooling self-centeredness of history—the instinct to preserve a cultural and intellectual heritage arises, analogous to the instinct to preserve one’s body. Writers in such times write with an existential intensity—they try to cast their culture forward down the stream of time like a canoe, hoping that posterity will climb in rather than allowing it bottom out on the rocks of catastrophe and sink without memorial.

In short, Bocaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, etc., could be viewed as intellectual tombstones: attempts to preserve some place in the future for the culture of their present.