Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

'True Histories' and 'Old Wives Tales': Renaissance Humanism and the 'Rise of the Novel'

Carver, R.

'True Histories' and 'Old Wives Tales': Renaissance Humanism and the 'Rise of the Novel' Thumbnail


Authors

R. Carver



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.

Citation

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

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date 2001
Deposit Date May 12, 2008
Publicly Available Date May 12, 2008
Journal Ancient narrative
Print ISSN 1568-3540
Publisher Barkhuis
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 1
Pages 322-349
Publisher URL http://www.ancientnarrative.com/archive/antocvol01.htm

Files




Downloadable Citations