Frieze Frame: Part IV | The Hudson Review
hudsonreview.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hudsonreview.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Frieze Frame: Part IV | The Hudson Review
hudsonreview.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hudsonreview.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Last modified on Mon 5 Apr 2021 07.02 EDT
Fans of Paul Cooperâs podcast Fall of Civilizations will know that it usually begins in a particular way. A traveller, often far from home, encounters a ruin that hints at a vast and forgotten story of the past.
Hiding from bandits in the desert, the Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle takes shelter in the shadow of the crumbling Ziggurat of Ur. Clambering through the rubble of a once magnificent site of Roman Britain, an unknown poet of the eighth or ninth century writes an elegy to the broken âwork of giantsâ.
With the scene set, the piano theme plays and the listener is on their way, transported â if only for a while â from the 21st century, with its crises of economics, climate and Covid, to the time of the Aztecs, the Sumerians or the Vikings.
Abstract
This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus’s
Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius’s
Satyricon, or Heliodorus’s
Aethiopica, constitute a genre. Although there is a great deal of porousness between different forms of prose in antiquity, the essay concludes by exploring why the ancient novel, ignored by critics for so long, has now become such a hot topic. It argues that much as the postwar critics could not fit the ancient novel into their histories, now the ancient novel’s interests in sophisticated erotics, narrative flair, and cultural hybridity seem all too timely.