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

这项研究的结果将在埃克塞特大学完成，并将出版专著《读者的世界，书的世界：古代世界的小说阅读》，提交给剑桥大学出版社。这本书旨在探索罗马帝国时期（公元一世纪至四世纪）的散文小说。古代小说是古希腊和古罗马时期最伟大的散文小说实验之一，在这一时期蓬勃发展。然而，没有一篇古代论文讨论了小说的本质或小说的类型。这种明确理论的缺乏意味着我们对古代小说的理解存在着一个关键的缺口。全书共分五章，每一章都从不同的角度探讨了小说世界和读者世界之间的关系。第一章探讨了这些叙事的不同方式，元虚构的，与小说本身的经验，分析了用来描述读者从真实世界到虚拟世界过渡的经验的语言和意象。这一分析扩展了我们对古代读者和作家如何将阅读小说的体验概念化的理解。第二章考察了这一时期的小说如何通过在序言中上演阅读小说来戏剧化他们自己的协议并为他们的类型建立模板。这些序言是关于古代小说阅读方法的隐含理论的重要段落。第三章探讨小说如何戏剧化读者与材料文本的相遇——卷轴或书本身。本章对古代小说与更广泛的当代书面文化、文本、纸莎草、墨水和书面文字的世界相互作用的一些方式提供了独到的见解。第四章探讨伪纪实小说。在这里，小说的世界通过假装呈现属于读者世界的真实文本而侵入读者的世界。这些文本对于读者世界和书中的世界之间的互动来说是特别具有启发性的案例研究；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。第五章以卢西安的《真实故事》为个案，分析读者的现实世界与小说的幻想世界之间争夺权威的竞争。在这里，两个世界之间模糊的界限被推向了极端。矛盾的是，作者坚持他承认不可能是真实的叙述的真实性。因此，书中明显的虚假世界挑战了读者的现实权威。这种悖论的设计是为了让读者陷入两难的境地，这凸显了小说本身的矛盾本质——一种读者心甘情愿地接受他明知不是真的主张的体验。本研究的主要目的是通过对小说文本本身的分析来阐明古代世界对小说的文学批评思想。这个项目的学术背景是由当前两个非常活跃的学术领域构成的：古代小说，以及罗马帝国的文学和知识文化。这本书旨在通过研究不断扩展的小说叙事类型与作者和读者所居住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。具体来说，这本书还提供了一个独特的新途径，探索古代散文小说和当代书面文化之间的对话。这扩大了我们对书作为古代读者想象中的文化人工制品的重要性的理解。

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.