The Romance between Greece and the East

By Tim Whitmarsh

Book Overview

The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1107543002
• ISBN13: 9781107543003
• Release Date: July 2015
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 412 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"