Dirty love : the genealogy of the ancient Greek novel / Tim Whitmarsh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Whitmarsh, Tim, author.

Series:

Onassis series in Hellenic culture.

Onassis series in Hellenic culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greek fiction--History and criticism.

Greek fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Where does the Greek novel come from? 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 definitively Greek founding fathers, the novel revelled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions (or at least affected to combine them: it is often hard to tell how ‘authentic’ the non-Greek material is). More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridisation, 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, transformation and mess. 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 covers such texts as Ctesias’s Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis.

Contents:

Preface

Abbreviations

Prelude

First Movement Hellenism and Hybridity: 1 Dirty Love

2 An Essay on the Origins 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’s 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 1

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

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Other Format:

Print version :

ISBN:

0-19-088078-3

0-19-088079-1

0-19-987659-2