The Ancient Novel and Reader Response

Carlo Caruso, Luca Graverini, Jeffrey P. Ulrich

• Publisher: Barkhuis
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9789493194786
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume – a collection of essays first conceived in a conference at the University of Siena in 2021 – offers a series of studies on the emotional, embodied, and cognitive aspects of engaging with narratives from antiquity to the modern period. Eschewing the intellectualized hermeneutic impulse always to search for underlying meaning, which has dominated intertextual and narratological treatments of ancient narrative texts, the contributors to this volume focus instead on cognitively loaded phenomena – such as the mental modeling of characters in narrative, their bodily and emotional reactions to events, immersion and enactive engagement in narrative description, the reader's assumption of physical roles or voices of characters, and so on. In addition to analyzing the cognitive and embodied responses of characters in ancient narratives and their ripple effect on readers, we are also interested in understanding the downstream influence of these cognitive effects from ancient texts on modern narrative. The volume thus concludes with three essays on the reception and adaptation of ancient narratives in different time periods and languages. In this sense, Ancient Narrative and Reader Response aims to elucidate how cognitive effects can even be translated across language, genre, and culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction: Reader Response and Immersion
• Part I - Narrative Emotions
• Chapter 1 - Narratives on the Edge of Entropy: The Cathartic Effects of Surprisal in Chariton’s Callirhoe
• Chapter 2 - Enactive Phantasia, Immersion, and Readerly Suspense: The Experience of Nightmares in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon
• Chapter 3 - Cognitive Dissonance and Suspense
• Part II - Cognitive Approaches
• Chapter 4 - The Maidens and the Bull: Dangers and Pleasures of “immersion”
• Chapter 5 - Outlined Bodies, Painted Souls: Entrancing and Excluding the Embodied Reader in Petronius’ Pinacotheca
• Part III - Embodied Experiences
• Chapter 6 - Hearing Voices: Character, Rhetoric, and Reader Response in the Alexander Romance
• Chapter 7 - Intercorporeality as Intertextuality in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
• Part IV - Reviving Classical Models
• Chapter 8 - Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499): An Antique Novel for Modern Readers
• Chapter 9 - Per l’analisi della nudità in letteratura: Ekphrasis, cognitivismo ed enargeia, dai moderni agli antichi
• Chapter 10 - Ironic Classicism: Ekphrasis in Wieland’s Fictional Antiquity
• Abstracts
• Contributors
• Indices