Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel

Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, Gareth Schmeling, Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, Gareth Schmeling

• Publisher: Barkhuis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9789077922545
• eBook ISBN:
  9789491431470
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The present volume comprises most of the papers delivered at RICAN 4 in 2007. The focus is placed on readers and writers in the ancient novel and broadly in ancient fiction, though without ignoring readers and writers of the ancient novel. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: the reading of novels in antiquity as a process of active engagement with the text (Konstan); the dialogic character, involving writer and reader, of Lucian's Verae Historiae (Futre Pinheiro); book divisions in Chariton's Callirhoe as prompts guiding the reader towards gradual mastery over the text (Whitmarsh); polypragmosyne (curiosity) in ancient fiction and how it affects the practice of reading novels (Hunter); the intriguing relationship between the writing and reading of inscriptions in ancient fiction (Slater); the tension between public and private in constructing and reading of texts inserted in the novelistic prose (Nimis); the intertextual pedigree of the poet Eumolpus (Smith); Seneca's Claudius and Petronius' Encolpius as readers of Homer and Virgil and writers of literary scenarios (Paschalis); the ways in which some Greek novels draw the reader's attention to their status as written texts (Bowie); the interfaces between tellers and receivers of stories in Antonius Diogenes (Morgan); the generic components and the putative author of the Alexander Romance (Stoneman); Diktys as a writer and ways of reading his Ephemeris (Dowden); the presence and character of Iliadic intertexts in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (Harrison); the contrasting roles of the narrator-translator in Apuleius' Metamorphoses and De deo Socratis (Fletcher); seriocomic strategies by Roman authors of narrative fiction and fable (Graverini & Keulen); reading as a function for recognizing 'allegorical moments' in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (Zimmerman); active and passive reading as embedded in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius; and the importance of book reading in Augustine's 'novelistic' Confessions (Hunink).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Active Reader and the Ancient Novel
• Divide and Rule: Segmenting Callirhoe and Related Works
• The Curious Incident …: polypragmosyne and the Ancient Novel
• Reading Inscription in the Ancient Novel
• Cite and Sound: The Prosaics of Quotation in the Ancient Novel
• Eumolpus the Poet
• Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and Petronius’ Satyricon
• The Uses of Bookishness
• Readers writing Readers, and Writers reading Writers: Reflections of Antonius Diogenes
• The Author of the Alexander Romance
• Reading Diktys: The Discrete Charm of Bogosity
• Apuleius and Homer: Some Traces of the Iliad in the Metamorphoses
• No Success like Failure: The Task of the Translator in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
• Roman Fiction and its Audience: Seriocomic Assertions of Authority
• ‘Food for Thought’ for Readers of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass
• To Reason and to Marvel: Images of the Reader in the Life of Apollonius
• Hating Homer, Fighting Virgil: Βooks in Augustine’s Confessions
• Abstracts
• Indices