Dirty love : the genealogy of the ancient Greek novel /
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 G...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2018]
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| Series: | Onassis series in Hellenic culture.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | 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, and 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 makes a virtue ofthe 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 toGreek cultural identity. It 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, 201 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780190880798 0190880791 9780199876594 0199876592 |