Ancient Narrative and Reader Response

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.