Religion in the Ancient Novel
Zeitlin, Froma I.
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, March 2007
Abstract
This chapter of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel, ed. Tim Whitmarsh, (2007) surveys the pervasive presence of religion and the sacred in the extant Greek and Roman novels and addresses the much discussed issues of its roles and functions, with an emphasis on the challenges the topic poses to the interpretation of the genre’s core erotic ideology. It also explores instances of the fictional imagination at work in absorbing, modifying, and creatively refining a few selected religious elements.
Religion plays a central role in the plot of virtually every fictional narrative, influencing the lives, actions, mentality, practices, beliefs, and eventual fates of the characters (and narrators); the types, interventions, and motives of divinity or other uncanny forces; the use of mythological exemplars, and more broadly, the array of problems that the entire subject poses for interpretation of the genre’s conventions.
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