Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, flourished in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure. Enormously popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s first appeared in 1989.Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: romance, travel, adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.
This companion addresses a topic of continuing contemporary relevance, both cultural and literary. Offers both a wide-ranging exploration of the classical novel of antiquity and a wealth of close literary analysis Brings together the most up-to-date international scholarship on the ancient novel, including fresh new academic voices Includes focused chapters on individual classical authors, such as Petronius, Xenophon and Apuleius, as well as a wide-ranging thematic analysis Addresses perplexing questions concerning authorial expression and readership of the ancient novel form Provides an accomplished introduction to a genre with a rising profile
From classics and history to Jewish rabbinic narratives and the canonical and noncanonical gospels of earliest Christianity, the relevance of studying the novel of the later classical periods of Greek and Rome is widely endorsed. Ancient novels contain insights beyond literary theories and philosophical musings to new sources for understanding the popular culture of antiquity. Some scholars, in fact, refer to ancient novels as “alternative histories,” for they tell history implicitly rather than with the intentional biases of the historian. The Novel in the Ancient World surveys the new approaches and insights to the ancient novel and wrestles with issues such as the development, transformation, and christianization of the novel (Spirit-inspired versus inspired by the Muses). This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
This widely acclaimed text offers an introduction to the subject and presents an overview of the latest research. Substantially updated and expanded from the very successful German edition of 1986.
This volume comprises the revised versions of selected papers read at the International Conference on the Ancient Novel (Groningen, July 2000). The papers cover a wide range of scholarly issues that were prominent in the programme of the conference, and feature the most recent approaches to research on the ancient novel. The essays combine judicious use of literary theory with traditional scholarship, and examine the ancient novels and related texts, such as Oriental tales and Christian narrative, both in their larger, literary, cultural and social context, and as sources of inspiration for Byzantine and modern fiction. This book is important not only for classicists and literary historians, but also for a general public of those interested in narrative fiction.
This special issue of Ancient Narrative Supplementum 1, entitled 'Space in the Ancient Novel', brings together a collection of revised papers, originally presented at the International conference under the same title organized by the Department of Philology (Division of Classics) of the University of Crete and held in Rethymnon, on May 14-15, 2001. This conference inaugurated what is hoped to become a new series of biennial International meetings on the Ancient Novel (RICAN, Rethymnon International Conferences on the Ancient Novel) which aspires to continue the reputable tradition of the Groningen Colloquia on the Novel, established by Heinz Hofmann and Maaike Zimmerman. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 1 includes two additional contributions by Catherine Connors and Judith Perkins, both originally presented in ICAN 2000 at Groningen in July 25-30, 2000 and included here in revised form, and an article by Stelios Panayotakis, which closely relates to the theme of the Rethymnon conference.
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.
The Book of the Ancient World is an account of our common heritage from the dawn of civilization to the coming of the Greeks. It is the story of how human beings began their great adventure of learning how to live; of how they have sought to satisfy the practical needs of their bodies, the questioning of their minds, and the searching of their spirits. To this end it subordinates details of political events to the record of things that lie at the foundation or our modern civilization. Dorothy Mills had an uncanny and unique ability to write history that is interesting and at the same time based on sound scholarship. Her direct, engaging approach is valued increasingly by the many parents in our day who are looking for reliable materials for home study, as well as by many private school educators. The highly-prized six volumes of her historical works (see below) have become very scarce on the used book market, and so Dawn Chorus has undertaken to reprint them as part of its effort to offer texts ideally suited to the needs of a new generation of teachers and students. In a world where the quality of education has so deteriorated, may the reissue of this wonderful historical series shine as a beacon to a new generation of young (and not so young) scholars . Dawn Chorus publishes these five other books by Dorothy Mills: The Book of the Ancient Greeks; The Book of the Ancient Romans; The People of Ancient Israel; The Middle Ages; and Renaissance and Reformation Times. Dawn Chorus has also republished another outstanding, and long-out-of-print historical series perfectly suited for home or school use (and highly recommended in home-school curricula), entitled The Picturesque Tale of Progress, by Olive Beaupre Miller. It is available in large format (9 volumes), or smaller, double-bound format (5 volumes).
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).
