Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts

Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel

Victoria Rimell

• Publisher: Barkhuis
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9789077922231
• eBook ISBN:
  9789491431425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Greek and Roman novels can be seen as an important transitional moment in the trajectory from performance to reading, from oralism to textuality, that has underpinned the history of discourse in European consciousness since the 5th century BC. In different and intriguing ways, they explore the contrast, tension, conflict, competition or dialogue between modes of discourse, which frame the novel's concern with identity and self-fashioning, as well as advertising innovation more generally.This volume brings together an international group of scholars interested in ancient and modern constructions of orality and writing and how they are reflected and manipulated in the ancient novel. The essays deal not only with questions of genre, oral poetics and traditions, but also with how various ways of pitting or collapsing modes of representation can become loaded articulations of wider world-views, of cultural, literary, epistemological anxieties and aspirations. The contributors focus in particular on issues surrounding theatricality, gender identity, rhetorical performance, epistolarity, monumentality and power in the ancient novel.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Orality and Authority in Xenophon of Ephesus
• Omero e la Sibilla. Mimesi e oralità nella Cena Trimalchionis
• The Inward Turn: Writing, Voice and the Imperial Author in Petronius
• Visualising Drama, Oratory and Truthfulness in Apuleius Metamorphoses 3
• Vocis immutatio: The Apuleian Prologue and the Pleasures and Pitfalls of Vocal Versatility
• The Ass’s Ears and the Novel’s Voice. Orality and the Involvement of the Reader in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
• Advertising One’s Own Story. Text and Speech in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon
• La voix et la main : la lettre intime dans Chéréas et Callirhoé
• Poiein aischra kai legein aischra, est ce vraiment la même chose? Ou la bouche souillée de Chariclée
• ‘Novels in the Greek Letter’: Inversions of the Written-Oral Hierarchy in the Briefroman ‘Themistocles’
• Divine Epistemology: the relationship between speech and writing in the Aithiopika.
• Fixity and Fluidity in Apollonius of Tyre
• List of Contributors
• Index of Subjects