The Ancient Novel

3 units

This Writing Intensive seminar provides a thorough introduction to the works of prose fiction written in Ancient Greek and Latin, most dating from the 1st through 3rd centuries CE. These novels are concerned with romance, human psychology and sexuality, exotic travel and adventure, magical phenomena, and religious experience. Once excluded from the classical literary canon, in the last half-century these works came to occupy an important place in the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. We will consider them both as literary texts that yield many interesting ideas through close reading, and as vehicles for Greek and Roman constructions of cultural, social, and gender categories.