Res Vera, Res Ficta - Fictionality in Ancient Epistolography / edited by Janja Soldo and Claire Rachel Jackson.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Soldo, Janja, editor.

Jackson, Claire Rachel, editor.

Series:

Trends in classics. ; Volume 149.

Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes Series ; Volume 149

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Epistolary fiction--History and criticism.

Epistolary fiction.

Greek letters--History and criticism.

Greek letters.

Latin letters--History and criticism.

Latin letters.

Literature, Ancient--History and criticism.

Literature, Ancient.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston, Massachusetts : De Gruyter, [2023]

Summary:

Letters are famously easy to recognise, notoriously hard to define. Both real and fictitious letters can look identical to the point that there are no formal criteria which can distinguish one from the other. This has long been a point of anxiety in scholarship which has considered the value of an ancient letter to be determined by its authenticity, necessitating a strict binary opposition of genuine as opposed to fake letters. This volume challenges this dichotomy directly. Rather than defining epistolary fiction as a literary genre in opposition to 'genuine' letters or reducing it down to fixed rhetorical features, it argues that fiction is an inherent and fluid property of letters which ancient writers recognised and exploited. This volume contributes to wider scholarship on ancient fiction by demonstrating through the multiplicity of genres, contexts, and time periods discussed how complex and multifaceted ancient awareness of fictionality was. As such, this volume shows that letters are uniquely well-placed to unsettle disciplinary boundaries of fact and fiction, authentic and spurious, and that this allows for a deeper understanding of how ancient writers conceptualised and manipulated the fictional potential of letters.

Contents:

Intro

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: Fictions of Genre

Part I: (Auto)Biographical Fictions

Fact and Fiction in Pliny's Epistles: The Augustan Poetry Book and its Legacies

Fiction and Authenticity in the Letters of Euripides

Greetings from the Margin: Ovid's Epistulae ex Ponto

Part II: Editorial Fictions

Just Some Notes for My Own Use: Arrian's ('Arrian's'?) Letter to Lucius Gellius

Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares: From Authentic Letters to Literary Artefact

Part III: Pseudepigraphic Fictions

The Latin Letters of Pseudo-Brutus (Cic. Brut. 1.16 and 1.17)

Fictionality and Pseudepigraphy in the Apocryphal Letter Exchange between Seneca and Paul

Part IV: Ekphrastic Fictions

Fictions in the Real World: Language and Reality in Cicero's Letters

Let's Get Real: Ekphrasis, Reality and Fiction in Pliny's Epistles

List of Contributors

Bibliography

General Index

Index Locorum.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

3-11-130812-X