Find a copy in the library
Finding libraries that hold this item...
Details
| Document Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Margaret Anne Doody |
| ISBN: | 0813521688 9780813521688 |
| OCLC Number: | 31291910 |
| Description: | xx, 580 p., [24] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm. |
| Contents: | Introduction: In Search of the Ancient Novel -- Ch. I. The Ancient Novel -- Ch. II. Love and Suffering: The Stories of the Ancient Novels -- Ch. III. Goddesses and Virgins: The Freedoms of Chastity -- Ch. IV. Apollonius of Tyre and Heliodorus' Aithiopika: Fathers and Daughters, and Unriddling Mother's Plot -- Ch. V. Parody, Masculinity, and Metamorphosis: The Roman Novels of Petronius and Apuleius -- Ch. VI. The Novelistic Nature of Ancient Prose Fiction: Character, Dialogue, Setting, Images -- Ch. VII. Literary Self-Consciousness and Ancient Prose Fiction: Allusion, Narrative, Texts, and Readers -- Ch. VIII. The Ancient Novel, Religion, and Allegory -- Ch. IX. Ancient Novels and the Fiction of the Middle Ages -- Ch. X. The Ancient Novel in the Age of Print: Versions and Commentaries of the Renaissance -- Ch. XI. Novels in the Seventeenth Century: Histories of Fiction and Cultural Conflicts. |
| Responsibility: | Margaret Anne Doody. |
Abstract:
Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness - but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign - dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others - largely out of literature and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself.
This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres - new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Pudd'nhead Wilson, L'Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.
Reviews
