Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel

ISBN-13: 9780199576944 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 360 str.

Stefan Tilg

Opis

The best known variety of the ancient novel - sometimes identified with the ancient novel tout court - is the Greek love novel. The question of its origins has intrigued scholars for centuries and has been the focus of a great deal of research. Stefan Tilg proposes a new solution to this ancient puzzle by arguing for a personal inventor of the genre, Chariton of Aphrodisias, who wrote the first Greek (and, with that, the first European) love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid-first century AD. Tilg's conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics, and will shed fresh light upon the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

Recenzje

well researched, and the analysis takes into account a wide range of evidence, literary, historical and archaeological. Moreover, the argument is clearly presented and, despite the rather specialised subject matter of the book, translations of ancient citations will go a long way towards rendering the monograph accessible to the non-specialist.

O autorze

Stefan Tilg is Research Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation.