Medieval Greek Storytelling

Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium

edited by Panagiotis Roilos

Book cover: Medieval Greek Storytelling

Extent: 260 pages

Publisher: Harrassowitz Verlag

Subjects: Literary Studies, Medieval Studies

Series: Mainzer Veröffentlichungen zur Byzantinistik

Series volume number: 12

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(October 2014)

ISBN: 9783447101059

Price: $103.00

Out of stock

Written by eminent scholars in the field of Byzantine studies, the majority of the chapters included in Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium are revised versions of the papers that were presented at an international conference that Panagiotis Roilos organized at Harvard University in December 2009. The topics explored in the book cover an extensive chronological range of postclassical Greek culture(s) and literature, from early Christianity to early modern Greek literature, with a pronounced focus on the Byzantine period, as well as a variety of genres: hagiography, historiography, chronicles, “patriographic literature”, the novel, the epic, and philological commentary. One of the main aims of the book is to shift the focus of current scholarship on fictionality from those genres that are traditionally identified as “fictional”, such as the novel and the epic, to other literary discourses that lay claim to historical objectivity and veracity. By doing so, this volume as a whole sheds new light on the interpenetration of different, often apparently antithetical discursive categories and strategies and on the ensuing problematization of established demarcations between “historicity” and fictionality, as well as “objectivity” and imaginary arbitrariness, in diverse Byzantine literary and broader cultural contexts.

  • Edited by Panagiotis Roilos