The world of the reader, the world of the book: reading fiction in the ancient world

这项研究的成果将在埃克塞特大学完成，将成为一本专著，《读者的世界，书的世界：古代世界的阅读小说》，提交给剑桥大学出版社。这本书着手探讨罗马帝国时期（公元1世纪至4世纪）的散文小说。古代小说是希腊和罗马古代散文小说中最伟大的实验之一，在这一时期蓬勃发展。然而，没有古代论文生存，讨论小说的性质或小说的体裁。这种缺乏任何明确的理论意味着我们对古代小说的理解存在着一个关键的空白。本书共分五章，每一章都从不同的角度审视小说世界与读者世界之间的关系。第一章探讨了这些叙事以不同的方式被小说本身的经验所占据，分析了用于描述读者从真实的过渡到虚构世界的经历的语言和意象。分析扩展了我们对古代读者和作家如何概念化阅读小说经验的理解。第二章考察了这一时期小说如何通过在序言中上演阅读小说来戏剧化自己的协议并建立其体裁的模板。这些序言是关于古代阅读小说方法的隐含理论的关键段落。第三章探讨小说如何戏剧化地表现读者与材料文本（卷轴或书本身）的相遇。本章对古代小说与更广泛的当代书面文化、文本、纸草、墨水和书面文字的世界相互作用的一些方式提供了原创性的见解。第四章探讨伪纪实小说。在这里，小说世界通过假装呈现属于读者世界的真实文本而侵入读者世界。这些文本特别揭示了读者世界和书中世界之间互动的案例研究;他们故意模糊了两者之间的界限，引发了读者如何区分“事实”和“虚构”的问题。第五章以卢西恩的《真实的故事》为例，分析读者的真实的世界与小说的幻想世界之间的权力争夺。在这里，两个世界之间模糊的界限被推到了极端。矛盾的是，作者坚持他承认不可能真实的叙述的真实性。因此，书中明显虚假的世界挑战了读者现实的权威。这一悖论旨在将读者置于一个两难的境地，凸显小说本身的悖论性--读者在明知是不真实的情况下，却心甘情愿地接受了一些主张。本研究的主要目的是通过对小说文本本身的分析，阐明古代世界关于小说的文学批评思想。这个项目的学术背景是由当前学术界两个非常活跃的领域形成的：古代小说，以及罗马帝国的文学和知识文化。本书旨在通过研究不断扩大的虚构叙事类型与作者和读者所处的知识和文化背景之间的复杂对话，为这一学术活动做出贡献。因此，它的目的是阐明虚构的叙事是如何构思，部署和接受在希腊罗马世界。具体而言，该书还通过探讨古代散文小说与当代书面文化之间的对话，提供了一种独特的新方法。这扩大了我们对这本书作为古代读者想象中的文化手工艺品的重要性的理解。

The outcome of this research, to be completed at the University of Exeter, will be a monograph, The world of the reader, the world of the book: reading fiction in the ancient world for submission to Cambridge University Press. The book sets out to explore prose fiction in the period of the Roman Empire (first to fourth centuries C.E.). Ancient novels, which were among the greatest experiments in prose fiction from Greek and Roman antiquity flourished in this period. However, no ancient treatise survives which discusses the nature of fiction or the genre of the novel. This lack of any explicit theory means that there is a critical gap in our understanding of fiction in antiquity. The book comprises five chapters, each of which examines the relationship between the world of the fiction and the world of the reader from a different perspective. The first chapter explores different ways in which these narratives are preoccupied, metafictionally, with the experience of fiction itself, analysing the language and imagery that are used to describe the reader's experience of the transition from the real to a fictitious world. The analysis expands our understanding of how ancient readers and writers conceptualized the experience of reading fiction. The second chapter examines the ways in which novels of this period dramatize their own protocols and establish templates for their genre by staging fictions of reading in their prologues. These prologues are crucial passages of implied theory about ancient approaches to reading fiction. The third chapter examines how fictions dramatize the reader's encounter with the material text - the scroll or book itself. This chapter offers original insight into some of the ways in which ancient fiction interacts with the wider contemporary written culture, the world of texts, papyrus, ink and the written word. The fourth chapter explores pseudo-documentary fiction. Here, the world of the fiction encroaches into the world of the reader by feigning to present authentic texts belonging to the reader's world. These texts are particularly revealing case-studies for the interaction between the world of the reader and the world of the book; their deliberate blurring of the boundaries which separate the two provokes questions about how readers distinguish 'fact' from 'fiction'. The fifth chapter focuses on Lucian's True Stories as a case-study in the competitive jockeying for authority between the real world of the reader and the fantasy world of the fiction. Here the blurring-of-boundaries between the two worlds is pushed to extremes. The author, paradoxically, insists on the truthfulness of a narrative which he admits cannot be true. The explicitly false world of the book therefore challenges the authority of the reader's reality. This paradox is designed to place the reader in a dilemma, which highlights the paradoxical nature of fiction itself - an experience where the reader willingly accepts claims which (s)he knows are not true.The key aims of this research are to illuminate literary critical thought about fiction in the ancient world through the analysis of the fictional texts themselves. The scholarly context for this project is formed by two very active areas of current scholarship: on ancient fiction, and on the literary and intellectual culture of the Roman empire. The book aims to contribute to this scholarly activity by examining the complex dialogue between the expanding genre of fictional narratives and the intellectual and cultural context inhabited by their authors and readers. It thus aims to illuminate how fictitious narratives were conceived, deployed and received in the Graeco-Roman world. Specifically the book also offers a distinctive new approach by exploring the dialogue between ancient prose fiction and contemporary written culture. This expands our understanding of the importance of the book as a cultural artefact in the ancient reader's imagination.