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Department of English Studies

Academic Staff

Publication details for Dr Robert Carver

Carver, R. (2001). ''True Histories' and 'Old Wives Tales': Renaissance Humanism and the 'Rise of the Novel'.'. Ancient Narrative. 1: 322-349.

Author(s) from Durham

Abstract

Taking Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel as its point of
departure, the article argues that it is only by discriminating between
different manifestations of fiction – by exploring discontinuities as well as
continuities – that we can hope to disentangle the genealogy of the Novel.
Following an examination of Renaissance diatribes against medieval
romance and Milesian tales with a survey of the Menippean, encyclopaedic,
and epideictic fictions that the Humanists favoured, it concludes that one of
the main impetuses in the development of the modern Novel was the
recovery and promotion of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica which allowed romance
to be redeemed as prose-epic.

Notes

Ed. Maaike Zimmerman, et al. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing & The University Library Groningen ISBN 90-807390-1-4. Revised hard-copy version of electronic article.