Tim Whitmarsh

Dirty Love (eBook, PDF)

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Some of the world's earliest large-form fictional narratives--what would today be called novels-are found in ancient Greece. Dating back to the first century CE, these narratives contain many of the elements common to the novelistic genre, for instance, the joining, separation, and reunion of two lovers. These ancient works have often been heralded as the ancestors of the modern novel; but what can we say of the origins of the Greek novel itself? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to the founding fathers within the tradition, the novel reveled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions. More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridization, or what we would now call "mixed-race" relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or "dirtiness," of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression and transformation. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. Dirty Love focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and explores such texts as Ctesias' Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance, and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal not only to those interested in Greek literary history, but also to readers of near eastern and biblical literature.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. April 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199876594
• Artikelnr.: 54559176

Autorenporträt

Tim Whitmarsh is the second A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He also holds honorary roles at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Universities of Pretoria and Exeter. He is the author of 7 books, including most recently Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, which has been translated into Dutch and (soon to appear) Chinese and Greek. He has written over 70 academic articles on ancient Greece, and appears regularly in newspapers such as The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and on BBC radio and TV.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Prelude
First movement: Hellenism and hybridity
1. Dirty love
2. A history of the novel
3. What is a novel?
4. Epic and novel
5. Sourcing Callirhoe
Second movement: Persians
6. The romance of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus
7. Who was Ctesias?
8. Persian love stories
9. Media studies
10. Cyrus' sex life
Third movement: Jews
11. Return to Joseph
12. The Jewish novel
13. Joseph in love
Fourth movement: Egyptians
14. The long Hellenistic
15. Alexander in kohl
16. Whose paradigm?
Fifth movement: How Greek is the Greek romance?
17. How Greek is the Greek romance?
18. Romancing Semiramis
19. Dirty love in late antiquity
20. Conclusion: the foundation of Marseilles, some brooch-pins, and the history of the novel