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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.
Contents
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
