Mapping Time and Space in Ancient Fiction

Abstract

This chapter aims at a Bakhtinian account that does justice to the insight of Ian Watt that a new form emerged in eighteenth-century fiction, reflected in the term “novel”. However, this development was hardly unprecedented: novelistic fiction had already appeared at least twice, in Renaissance Spain and the Roman empire. Various eighteenth-century English novels are canonical examples of the genre, but their genealogy can be traced back to antiquity, illuminating what distinguishes novelistic discourse and what is or is not modern about it. Ancient examples of novelistic fiction (e.g., Apuleius and Petronius) can be generically distinguished from Greek romance. Novelistic fiction has been invented more than once, and its earliest examples provide interesting precedents for what have been considered among the modern novel’s distinguishing features—such as contemporaneity and certain kinds of realism.