Lecture 1: recap

Some key themes from last term’s work:

• the ‘ideal’ novel in the Second Sophistic
• Hellenistic origins of the novel; parallel forms, contexts
• the pastoral impulse and romantic love
• the novel as field for an ‘archaeology’ of emotion
• the epistolary mode: letters as vehicle(?) of private emotion

Some emergent themes this term:

• the ancient novel in new cultural and intellectual contexts; are these novelists ‘sophists’, too?
• the role(s) of prose within the Roman Empire
• artifice, irony and the performing elite in Neronian Rome
• the novel as satire
• novels of religious conversion
• the novel as ‘metafiction’

Practicalities:

• lectures and seminars this term
• buying books
• assessment
• assessment for Latinists