What does the transition from orality to literacy have to do with fiction? Or do you mean something else?
Fiction arose as an autopoietic (systems theory term, not literary) response to the affordability and accessibility of print technologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, printing gave birth to an excess of pamphlets and small books on propriety, etiquette, religious observances, travel narratives, slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, pedagogical tools, dictionaries, and other texts we'd refer to as nonfiction. The seventeenth century did witness the publication of some clearly fictional romance narratives, but these were few and far between, and often extensions of post-medieval tales. Robinson Crusoe, often pointed to as one of the first English novels (a problematic identification, but useful), was basically a hybrid travel narrative and memoir (and was originally marketed as nonfiction before it was revealed to be fiction). Samuel Richardson's Pamela drew on pedagogical writings about feminine propriety. That these stories were "made up" reflects a shift in social consciousness toward language and print media. It might be posited that the emergence of "the novel" is an expected symptom of the proliferation of print in the 17th-18th centuries. These texts reveal a lot about not only social conventions and mores, but also about the industry of print at the time.
It's also worth pointing out that these writers were among the first to comment on what kind of literature they were producing. Many of them included prefaces to their works that meditated on what kind of "novel form" they were working with. Originally, that's what "novel" really means: a new and unspecified form. It's difficult for us today to imagine a world in which written fiction about common, everyday themes didn't exist. In oral cultures, the poems that were passed down speak of heroes and legends, not ordinary people. The same goes for medieval romances. Only with the novel, and with fictionality, do we finally get narratives about regular people--that is, people who were reading novels.
