This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Heliodorus’s Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as reflecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements.
Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary is an understanding of these ideal elements to a full understanding of the novels’ possible readings and their reader’s attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes.
Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also find the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas.
1. Introduction 2. Theoretical Background 3. Chariton’s Callirhoe 4. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 5. Heliodorus’s Aithiopika 6. Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 7. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 8. A Brief Concluding Postscript
Biography
Jean Alvares has been Professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University, USA, since 1996. His notable work includes Classical Myth and the New Millennium, with Patricia Salzman (2017), and the first full Latin and Greek program at a university in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with Dr. Hui Li, CO 2020.
