'He set up a stele of beryl': Scrutinising Identity through Space and Time in Fictional Imperial Travel Narratives

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I propose to study how and why fictionalising travel in imperial literature reconstitutes cultural history. In the texts I propose to study (which include Lucian's True History and Anacharsis, Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, Chariton's Callirhoe and the epistolary novels such Chion and Brutus), fictional narratives involving travel are inextricable from culturalhistorical concerns. For example, Lucian's encounter with Homer fictionally reconstitutes an understanding of Homeric literary history as he stakes his pseudo-imperial claim upon the Isles of the Blessed via the stele in VH 2.28. Similarly, figures such as Apollonius and Anacharsis become fictional travellers, whose traditions are reshaped through their fictional encounters during travel. In these texts, travel to fictional spaces in imperial literature is a method of examining Greco-Roman cultural history. The imperial period is a rich age for the study of travel fiction, since the Roman empire's complication of personal identities and conquest of 'infinite' space (Whitmarsh, 2012) means that travel to peripheries, particularly fictional peripheries, forces the traveller to acknowledge the limits of real imperial space. Real travel's exploration of identity's boundaries has been well-explored, and it has been recognised that 'real' travel narratives deal with intersecting cultural identity and imperial space. For Elsner (1994), Pausanias uses monuments as 'a frame through which to explore... the identity of self' as Greece's ruined glory is drawn against his identity as a Greek Roman citizen.Imperial fictionalisation has also been studied: N. Mheallaigh (2008, 2014) argues that ancient fiction is concerned with its own fictionality and the process of fictionalising Classicism. However, the specific role of fictional spaces in travel is comparatively neglected, with no study of how the unique role of journeys to fictionalised spaces over a range of fictional texts contributed to 'rethinking' cultural identity under the Roman empire. This study will ask how the Roman-imperial and fictional interact in these narratives and how the existence of empire shapes the cultural concerns of travel fiction. This will contribute to a greater appreciation of how fictionalisation in imperial travel narratives provides a limitless imaginative arena for probing the Roman hegemonic 'imperium sine fine' alongside GrecoRoman identity, via the 'stress-testing' of Greco-Roman cultural history in these alternative, often peripheral, spaces. Whilst my approach to fictionalised space will be informed by N. Mheallaigh and van den Heever's (2018) work, approaches from other disciplines can provide new perspectives about how fictional travel and space interacts with cultural-history and identity, specifically those developed for Science Fiction (SF) and Historical Fiction. Viglas (2016) has already applied theoretical approaches from SF to Lucian's VH, but this study's approach recognises that a crucial component of these fictional spaces is that they are also historical in nature. Both Kerslake (2007, SF) and Lukács (1920, historical fiction) argue that spatial (Kerslake) and temporal (Lukács) gaps in fictionalisation are manipulated to interrogate the reader's reality, whether it be Earth or the present. Uniting these in this study will reveal how fictional spaces become historico-cultural workshops, reconstituting Greco-Roman identity via the scrutiny of time and space together.