Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel

Author: Tim Whitmarsh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-04-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1139500589

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The Greek romance was for the Roman period what epic was for the Archaic period or drama for the Classical: the central literary vehicle for articulating ideas about the relationship between self and community. This book offers a reading of the romance both as a distinctive narrative form (using a range of narrative theories) and as a paradigmatic expression of identity (social, sexual and cultural). At the same time it emphasises the elasticity of romance narrative and its ability to accommodate both conservative and transformative models of identity. This elasticity manifests itself partly in the variation in practice between different romancers, some of whom are traditionally Hellenocentric while others are more challenging. Ultimately, however, it is argued that it reflects a tension in all romance narrative, which characteristically balances centrifugal against centripetal dynamics. This book will interest classicists, historians of the novel and students of narrative theory.


Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel

Author: Reader in Greek Literature Tim Whitmarsh

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 9781139042673

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The Greek romance was for the Roman period what epic was for the Archaic period or drama for the Classical: the central literary vehicle for articulating ideas about the relationship between self and community. This book offers a fresh reading of the romance both as a distinctive narrative form (using a range of narrative theories) and as a paradigmatic expression of identity (social, sexual and cultural). At the same time it emphasises the elasticity of romance narrative and its ability to accommodate both conservative and transformative models of identity. This elasticity manifests itself partly in the variation in practice between different romancers, some of whom are traditionally Hellenocentric while others are more challenging. Ultimately, however, it is argued that it reflects a tension in all romance narrative, which characteristically balances centrifugal against centripetal dynamics. This book will interest classicists, historians of the novel and students of narrative theory.


Dirty Love

Dirty Love

Author: Tim Whitmarsh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-02

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0190880783

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Some of the world's earliest large-form fictional narratives--what would today be called novels-are found in ancient Greece. Dating back to the first century CE, these narratives contain many of the elements common to the novelistic genre, for instance, the joining, separation, and reunion of two lovers. These ancient works have often been heralded as the ancestors of the modern novel; but what can we say of the origins of the Greek novel itself? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to the founding fathers within the tradition, the novel reveled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions. More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridization, or what we would now call "mixed-race" relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or "dirtiness," of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression and transformation. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. Dirty Love focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and explores such texts as Ctesias' Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance, and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal not only to those interested in Greek literary history, but also to readers of near eastern and biblical literature.


Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative

Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative

Author: Alex C. Purves

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-03-22

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1139487981

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In this wide-ranging survey of ancient Greek narrative from archaic epic to classical prose, Alex Purves shows how stories unfold in space as well as in time. She traces a shift in authorial perspective, from a godlike overview to the more focused outlook of human beings caught up in a developing plot, inspired by advances in cartography, travel, and geometry. Her analysis of the temporal and spatial dimensions of ancient narrative leads to new interpretations of important texts by Homer, Herodotus, and Xenophon, among others, showing previously unnoticed connections between epic and prose. Drawing on the methods of classical philology, narrative theory, and cultural geography, Purves recovers a poetics of spatial representation that lies at the core of the Greeks' conception of their plots.


Metaphor and the Ancient Novel

Metaphor and the Ancient Novel

Author: S. J. Harrison

Publisher: Barkhuis

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 9077922032

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This thematic fourth Supplementum to Ancient Narrative, entitled Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, is a collection of revised versions of papers originally read at the Second Rethymnon International Conference on the Ancient Novel (RICAN 2) under the same title, held at the University of Crete, Rethymnon, on May 19-20, 2003.Though research into metaphor has reached staggering proportions over the past twenty-five years, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to the subject of metaphor in relation to the ancient novel. Not every contributor takes into account theoretical discussions of metaphor, but the usefulness of every single paper lies in the fact that they explore actual texts while sometimes theorists tend to work out of context.


Crafting Characters

Crafting Characters

Author: Koen De Temmerman

Publisher:

Published: 2014-02

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0199686149

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Analyzes the characterization of the protagonists in the five extant, so-called 'ideal' Greek novels of the first few centuries C.E., using the conceptual couples of typification/individuation, idealistic/realistic characterization, and static/dynamic character to show their complexity.


Defining Greek Narrative

Defining Greek Narrative

Author: Douglas Cairns

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-03-24

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 074868011X

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An examination of what is distinct, what is shared and what is universal in Greek narrative traditions of a wide range of ancient Greek literary genres.


Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts

Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts

Author: Victoria Rimell

Publisher: Barkhuis

Published: 2007-06-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9077922237

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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.


Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel

Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel

Author: Stelios Panayotakis

Publisher: Barkhuis

Published: 2020-02-26

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 9493194043

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The present volume contains revised versions of most of the papers that were delivered at RICAN 7, which was held in Rethymnon, Crete, on 27-28 May 2013. The focus of the conference was on the portrayal and function of male and female slaves and their masters/mistresses in the ancient novel and related texts; the complex relationship between these social categories raises questions about slavery and freedom, gender and identity, stability of the self and social mobility, social control and social death. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: enslavement of elite women in Chariton's Callirhoe and Stoic ideas of moral slavery in Dio Chrysostom (Hilton); reversal of social status and techniques of (self-)characterization in Chariton (De Temmerman); the interaction between implicit and explicit narratives of slavery in Chariton and its effect on the readers of the novel (Owens); the narratological, structural and symbolic centrality of slavery in Xenophon's Ephesiaka (Trzaskoma); the socio-historical dimensions of slavery and the prominent discourse on despotism in Iamblichus' Babyloniaka (Dowden); the balance between historical accuracy and fiction in the representation of slavery in Achilles Tatius (Billault); animals, human slaves and elite masters, and the presence of Rome in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (Bowie); the distribution of slaves on the geographical, cultural and moral maps drawn in Heliodorus' Aithiopika (Montiglio); slave women and their relationships to their mistresses as positive and negative paradigms of love in Heliodorus' Aithiopika (Morgan and Repath); the freedman's world as a self-perpetuating and closed universe in Petronius' Satyrica (Bodel); beauty, slavery and the destabilization of societal norms and authority figures in Petronius' Satyrica (Panayotakis); the interaction between Roman comedy and elegy in the representation of the relationship of Lucius and Photis in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (May); a comparative analysis of the semantics and function of slavery-related terms in pseudo-Lucian's Onos and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (Paschalis); enslaved and free storytelling in the Life of Aesop and the history and evolution of the ancient fable tradition (Lefkowitz).