The Greek and Roman novels can be seen as an important transitional moment in the trajectory from performance to reading, from oralism to textuality, that has underpinned the history of discourse in European consciousness since the 5th century BC. In different and intriguing ways, they explore the contrast, tension, conflict, competition or dialogue between modes of discourse, which frame the novel's concern with identity and self-fashioning, as well as advertising innovation more generally.
This volume brings together an international group of scholars interested in ancient and modern constructions of orality and writing and how they are reflected and manipulated in the ancient novel. The essays deal not only with questions of genre, oral poetics and traditions, but also with how various ways of pitting or collapsing modes of representation can become loaded articulations of wider world-views, of cultural, literary, epistemological anxieties and aspirations. The contributors focus in particular on issues surrounding theatricality, gender identity, rhetorical performance, epistolarity, monumentality and power in the ancient novel.
Table of Contents
VICTORIA RIMELL, Introduction. JASON KÖNIG, Orality and Authority in Xenophon Of Ephesus. ANDREA CUCCHIARELLI, Omero e la Sibilla. Mimesi e oralità nella Cena Trimalchionis. VICTORIA RIMELL, The Inward Turn: Writing, Voice and the Imperial Author in Petronius. REGINE MAY, Visualising Drama, Oratory and Truthfulness in Apuleius Metamorphoses 3. WYTSE KEULEN, Vocis immutatio: The Apuleian Prologue and the Pleasures and Pitfalls of Vocal Versatility. LUCA GRAVERINI, The Ass's Ears and the Novel's Voice. Orality and the Involvement of the Reader in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. MARKO MARINČIČ, Advertising One's Own Story. Text and Speech in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon. PATRICK ROBIANO, La voix et la main : la lettre intime dans Chéréas et Callirhoé. ROMAIN BRETHES, Poiein aischra kai legein aischra, est ce vraiment la même chose? Ou la bouche souillée de Chariclée. OWEN HODKINSON, ‘Novels in the Greek Letter': Inversions of the Written-Oral Hierarchy in the Briefroman ‘Themistocles'. KATHRYN CHEW, Divine Epistemology: the Relationship between Speech and Writing in the Aithiopika. STELIOS PANAYOTAKIS, Fixity and Fluidity in Apollonius of Tyre. List of Contributors. Indices.
Extra information
A pdf file containing the Table of Contents, Introduction and Indices is available here for free.
Subscribers to the on line version of Ancient Narrative can download the pdf file wth the full text of this volume at http://www.ancientnarrative.com/.
A list of all volumes that have appeared in the Ancient Narrative Supplementa is available here.
Reviews
- René Martin, Revue des études Latines 87 (2009), 395-96
- Stefan Tilg, Museum Helveticum (2008) 65, 232
