Abstract
Any study of the origins of European fiction must inevitably begin with the ancient Greek epic, the prototype of all narrative forms. Epic has in fact dominated and influenced narrative forms right down to the present day, a fact acknowledged in the expression sometimes used to describe the modern novel, ‘latter-day epic’. The modern novel is the true, and possibly the only successor of ancient epic, bearing the same relationship to modern society as the epic did to ancient society.
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Notes
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 12.
George Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trs. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 66.
M. Rostovtzeff, A History of the Ancient World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Vol. 1, p. 370.
F. G. Kenyon, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 28.
Ludwig Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, trs. Leonard A. Magnus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1909), iii, 37.
Robert Liddell, A Treatise on the Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 18.
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (London: G. Bell, 1958), Introd. p. xi.
Samuel Lee Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 128.
Cf. Donald B. Durham, ‘Parody in Achilles Tatius’, Classical Philology January 1983, Vol. XXXIII, 1–19.
P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 72.
Cf. H. D. Rankin, Petronius the Artist: Essays on the Satyricon and its Author (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 58.
Alexander A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), p. 4.
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© 1989 Hubert McDermott
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McDermott, H. (1989). Ancient Narrative Modes. In: Novel and Romance: The Odyssey to Tom Jones. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10212-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10212-9_1
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