Massimo Fusillo

Marília Futre Pinheiro

Stephen A. Nimis

In the Greek world under the Roman Empire, the tradition of rhetorical learning reached its heyday in the second century A.D., with the cultural movement named as “Second Sophistic”. Despite the emphasis on rhetoric, literary culture lato senso was was also part of it, granting a special place to poetics and literary criticism. In the wake of this hermeneutical and interdisciplinary approach, the papers assembled in this volume explore signi cant issues, which are linked to the narrative structure of the ancient novel and to the tradition of rhetorical training, both envisaged as a web of well-constructed narrative devices.

Poetics and Rhetoric

Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel

Froma I. Zeitlin

Marilyn B. Skinner

Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the field of ancient sexuality, inquiry into major shifts in erotic consciousness is still in a preliminary stage. The essays in this collection, which focus upon the representation of the desiring subject in prose fiction, advance our understanding considerably as they probe the ambiguities surrounding the ostensible opposition of male and female in such texts. The volume will provide a needed point of departure for subsequent research into modifications to gender frameworks at a time of social transition.

Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient Novel

Narrating Desire

S. J. Harrison

The study of the reception of the ancient novel and of its literary and cultural heritage is one of the most appealing issues in the story of this literary genre. In no other genre has the vitality of classical tradition manifested itself in such a lasting and versatile manner as in the novel. However, this unifying, centripetal quality also worked in an opposite direction, spreading to and contaminating future literatures. Over the centuries, from Antiquity to the present time there have been many authors who drew inspiration from the Greek and Roman novels or used them as models, from Cervantes to Shakespeare, Sydney or Racine, not to mention the profound influence these texts exercised on, for instance, sixteenth-to eighteenth-century Italian, Portuguese and Spanish literature. Volume I is divided into sections that follow a chronological order, while Volume II deals with the reception of the ancient novel in literature and art. The first volume brings together an international group of scholars whose main aim is to analyse the survival of the ancient novel in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the modern era. The contributors to the second volume have undertaken the task of discussing the survival of the ancient novel in the visual arts, in literature and in the performative arts. The papers assembled in these two volumes on reception are at the forefront of scholarship in the field and will stimulate scholarly research on the ancient novel and its influence over the centuries up to modern times, thus enriching not only Classics but also modern languages and literatures, cultural history, literary theory and comparative literature.

Receptions of the Ancient Novel

Fictional Traces

Marília Futre Pinheiro

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