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Finding the Time for Ancient Novels


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. ....

New York , United States , University Of Chicago , France General , United Kingdom , Stanford University , Champagne Ardenne , City Of , Longus Daphnis , Viktor Shlovsky , Ernstr Curtius , Stuart Thomson Cambridge , Walter Scott , Phiroze Vasunia , Mieke Bal , Mikhail Bakhtin Cambridge , Richard Burridge , Caryl Emerson , Amanda Anderson , Michael Holquist , George Eliot , Stefano Evangelista , Jack Winkler Auctor , Stefan Collini , Shakespearian Latin , Srinivas Aravamudan ,