During the pandemic, we have all relied on each other even more to get through all of life’s problems. Our health all took a collective toll, we drank more, smoked more, and exercised less, and our mental health took a significant toll on the isolation we experienced, but we relied on each other to get by. Statistics from the Mental Halth Foundation said anxiety and worry due to the stress of the pandemic has declined significantly from 62% in March 2020 to 42% in late February 2021 This reduction in anxiety was also recorded amongst those with long-term physical health conditions, 54 per cent in June 2020 to 45 per cent in Feb 2021, and those with a pre-existing mental health diagnosis, 67 per cent in June 2020 to 58 per cent in Feb 2021.
Modernism and world war ii | English literature 1900-1945 | Cambridge University Press cambridge.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cambridge.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.