Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon

Description

Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, long regarded as the most controversial of the ancient Greek novels, is an outrageous tale of love and loss, of Phoenicians and philosophers, virginity tests and snuff murders. This book, the first published monograph on Achilles Tatius, is a study of Leucippe and Clitophon in its literary and visual contexts. It presents fresh insights into the work's narrative complexities and interpretative difficulties. It is particularly concerned with the novel's obsessions with the eye, with theories, descriptions, and metaphorics of the visual. It advances a reading that gives full play to the narrative's 'disgressions' - ekphrasis, sententia, blason, and spectacle - and discusses the politics of digressivity. This book is written to be accessible to non-specialists and all Greek is translated or paraphrased. It aims to contribute to a cultural history of viewing and to feminist literary criticism, as well as to the study of the ancient novel.

Helen Morales lectures in Classics at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is co-editor of Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (OUP, 2000).

'Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' 'Leucippe and Clitophon' is, scandalously, the first monograph in any language on Achilles' extraordinary text and only the second in English on any Greek novel other than Longus' fey pastoral tease, Daphnis and Chloe. It is, to say the least, a bar-raising performance.' The Times Literary Supplement '... this is an ambitious book that succeeds in its aim of contributing to 'the cultural history of viewing ... it brings classical scholarship up to date on a number of contemporary issues in the fields of gender studies and psychology. It also frequently delights in the rhetorical exuberance of Achilles Tatius that makes it such a pleasurable (and at times disturbing) text to read. As such Morales' monograph is to be highly commended.' Scholia Reviews 'This book is an important contribution to our understanding not only of Leucippe and Clithophon but also of ancient Greek novels in general, whose narrative strategies can be linked to, and decoded from, a complex visualistic discourse both within and outside the texts. Key elements of this poetics of vision and the novels' sophisticated design are ekphrastic descriptions, theatrical scenes, modes of viewing, and the visual impact of the female heroine, which Morales discusses in four chapters. All of them contain a series of stimulating close readings combined with a critical discussion of previous narratological approaches to the text, especially those by Stephen Nimis and Shady Bartsch.' Journal of Hellenic Studies