This volume – a collection of essays first conceived in a conference at the University of Siena in 2021 – offers a series of studies on the emotional, embodied, and cognitive aspects of engaging with narratives from antiquity to the modern period. Eschewing the intellectualized hermeneutic impulse always to search for underlying meaning, which has dominated intertextual and narratological treatments of ancient narrative texts, the contributors to this volume focus instead on cognitively loaded phenomena – such as the mental modeling of characters in narrative, their bodily and emotional reactions to events, immersion and enactive engagement in narrative description, the reader’s assumption of physical roles or voices of characters, and so on. In addition to analyzing the cognitive and embodied responses of characters in ancient narratives and their ripple effect on readers, we are also interested in understanding the downstream influence of these cognitive effects from ancient texts on modern narrative. The volume thus concludes with three essays on the reception and adaptation of ancient narratives in different time periods and languages. In this sense, Ancient Narrative and Reader Response aims to elucidate how cognitive effects can even be translated across language, genre, and culture.
Introduction: Reader Response and Immersion 1
I NARRATIVE EMOTIONS
PETER MEINECK
Narratives on the Edge of Entropy: The Cathartic Effects of Surprisal in Chariton’s Callirhoe 21
ALDO TAGLIABUE
Enactive Phantasia, Immersion, and Readerly Suspense: The Experience of Nightmares in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon 47
LUCA GRAVERINI
Cognitive Dissonance and Suspense 73
II COGNITIVE APPROACHES
AGLAE PIZZONE
The Maidens and the Bull: Dangers and Pleasures of “immersion” 97
JEFFREY P. ULRICH
Outlined Bodies, Painted Souls: Entrancing and Excluding the Embodied Reader in Petronius’ Pinacotheca 115
III EMBODIED EXPERIENCES
JACQUELINE ARTHUR-MONTAGNE
Hearing Voices: Character, Rhetoric, and Reader Response in the Alexander Romance 139
JENNIFER DEVEREAUX
Intercorporeality as Intertextuality in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 171
IV REVIVING CLASSICAL MODELS
CARLO CARUSO
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499): An Antique Novel for Modern Readers 201
DIEGO PELLIZZARI
Per l’analisi della nudità in letteratura: Ekphrasis, cognitivismo ed enargeia, dai moderni agli antichi 219
GIOVANNA PINNA
Ironic Classicism: Ekphrasis in Wieland’s Fictional Antiquity 241
Abstracts 259
Contributors 265
Indices 269
Index locorum 269
General Index 273
