Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction

Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction
Author: Victoria Rimell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2002-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139436252

Petronius' Satyricon, long regarded as the first 'novel' of the Western tradition, has always sparked controversy. It has been puzzled over as a strikingly modernist riddle, elevated as a work of exemplary comic realism, condemned as obscene and repackaged as a morality tale. This reading of the surviving portions of the work shows how the Satyricon fuses the anarchic and the classic, the comic and the disturbing, and presents readers with a labyrinth of narratorial viewpoints. Dr Rimell argues that the surviving fragments are connected by an imagery of disintegration, focused on the pervasive Neronian metaphor of the literary text as a human or animal body. Throughout, she discusses the limits of dominant twentieth-century views of the Satyricon as bawdy pantomime, and challenges prevailing restrictions of Petronian corporeality to material or non-metaphorical realms. This 'novel' emerges as both very Roman and very satirical in its 'intestinal' view of reality.

Fictional Traces: Receptions of the Ancient Novel Volume 1

Fictional Traces: Receptions of the Ancient Novel Volume 1
Author: Marília Futre Pinheiro
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011
Genre: Classical fiction
ISBN: 9077922970

"The study of the reception of the ancient novel and of its literary and cultural heritage is one of the most appealing issues in the story of this literary genre. In no other genre has the vitality of classical tradition manifested itself in such a lasting and versatile manner as in the novel. However, this unifying, centripetal quality also worked in an opposite direction, spreading to and contaminating future literatures. Over the centuries, from Antiquity to the present time there have been many authors who drew inspiration from the Greek and Roman novels or used them as models, from Cervantes to Shakespeare, Sydney or Racine, not to mention the profound influence these texts exercised on, for instance, sixteenth-to eighteenth-century Italian, Portuguese and Spanish literature. Volume I is divided into sections that follow a chronological order, while Volume II deals with the reception of the ancient novel in literature and art. The first volume brings together an international group of scholars whose main aim is to analyse the survival of the ancient novel in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the modern era. The contributors to the second volume have undertaken the task of discussing the survival of the ancient novel in the visual arts, in literature and in the performative arts. The papers assembled in these two volumes on reception are at the forefront of scholarship in the field and will stimulate scholarly research on the ancient novel and its influence over the centuries up to modern times, thus enriching not only Classics but also modern languages and literatures, cultural history, literary theory and comparative literature."--

Philosophy and the Ancient Novel

Philosophy and the Ancient Novel
Author: Silvia Montiglio
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9491431897

The papers assembled in this volume explore a relatively new area in scholarship on the ancient novel: the relationship between an ostensibly non-philosophical genre and philosophy. This approach opens up several original themes for further research and debate. Platonising fiction was popular in the Second Sophistic and it took a variety of forms, ranging from the intertextual to the allegorical, and discussions of the origins of the novel-genre in antiquity have centred on the role of Socratic dialogue in general and Plato's dialogues in particular as important precursors. The papers in this collection cover a variety of genres, ranging from the Greek and Roman novels to utopian narratives and fictional biographies, and seek by diverse methods to detect philosophical resonances in these texts.

Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel

Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel
Author: Michael Paschalis
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9077922547

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).

Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel

Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel
Author: Stelios Panayotakis
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9493194043

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).

Roman Satire

Roman Satire
Author: Daniel Hooley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470777087

This compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire examines the development of the genre, focusing particularly on the literary and social functionality of satire. It considers why it was important to the Romans and why it still matters. Provides a compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire. Focuses on the development and function of satire in literary and social contexts. Takes account of recent critical approaches. Keeps the uninitiated reader in mind, presuming no prior knowledge of the subject. Introduces each satirist in his own historical time and place – including the masters of Roman satire, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Facilitates comparative and intertextual discussion of different satirists.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Socrates

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Socrates
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1027
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004396756

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates – the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially “receptive” nature of Socrates’ influence (by contrast to Plato’s), chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods. Together they reveal the continuity of Socrates’ idiosyncratic, polyvalent, and deep imprint on the history of Western thought, and witness the value of further research in the reception of Socrates.

Writing Politics in Imperial Rome

Writing Politics in Imperial Rome
Author: W.J. Dominik
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9004217134

Roman literature is inherently political in the varied contexts of its production and the abiding concerns of its subject matter. This collection examines the strategies and techniques of political writing at Rome in a broad range of literature spanning almost two centuries, differing political systems, climates, and contexts. It applies a definition of politics that is more in keeping with modern critical approaches than has often been the case in studies of the political literature of classical antiquity. By applying a wide variety of critically informed viewpoints, this volume offers the reader not only a long view of the abiding techniques, strategies, and concerns of political expression at Rome but also many new perspectives on individual authors of the early empire and their republican precursors.