Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-974265-3
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

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 founding fathers within the tradition, 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' Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal to those interested not only in Greek literary history, but also in near-eastern and biblical literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whitmarsh, Tim

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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

Über Autor(innen)

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.