The Novel

The novel flourished at a time when Greek identity was above all a matter of cultural affiliation. This article argues that the characters in the novels are fundamentally concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity, culture, and identity – and that their readers must have been too. However, the relationship between the world depicted in the novels and that in which they were written and read remains difficult to characterize: it is remarkable, for example, that Rome, the great imperial power of the time, is never so much as mentioned in the extant Greek novels.

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Extant taxon · Identity (music) · Literature · Power (physics) · Sociology · Anthropology · Classical Antiquity Studies · History