Letters are famously easy to recognise, notoriously hard to define. Both real and fictitious letters can look identical to the point that there are no formal criteria which can distinguish one from the other. This has long been a point of anxiety in scholarship which has considered the value of an ancient letter to be determined by its authenticity, necessitating a strict binary opposition of genuine as opposed to fake letters.
This volume challenges this dichotomy directly. Rather than defining epistolary fiction as a literary genre in opposition to ‘genuine’ letters or reducing it down to fixed rhetorical features, it argues that fiction is an inherent and fluid property of letters which ancient writers recognised and exploited. This volume contributes to wider scholarship on ancient fiction by demonstrating through the multiplicity of genres, contexts, and time periods discussed how complex and multifaceted ancient awareness of fictionality was. As such, this volume shows that letters are uniquely well-placed to unsettle disciplinary boundaries of fact and fiction, authentic and spurious, and that this allows for a deeper understanding of how ancient writers conceptualised and manipulated the fictional potential of letters.

nexusstc/›res vera, res ficta‹: Fictionality in Ancient Epistolography/61952dd309f8216b28c1c6d79156258c.pdf

lgli/10.1515_9783111308128.pdf

lgrsnf/10.1515_9783111308128.pdf

zlib/no-category/Janja Soldo (editor); Claire Rachel Jackson (editor)/›res vera, res ficta‹: Fictionality in Ancient Epistolography_26052324.pdf

Soldo, Janja; Jackson, Claire Rachel

Saur, K. G., Verlag. ein Imprint der Walter de Gruyter GmbH

düsseldorf university press. in Walter de Gruyter GmbH

de Gruyter, Walter, GmbH

De Gruyter, Berlin, 2023

Germany, Germany

producers:
iTextSharp 5.0.6 (c) 1T3XT BVBA

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Acknowledgments 5
Contents 7
Introduction: Fictions of Genre 9
Part I: (Auto)Biographical Fictions 29
Fact and Fiction in Pliny’s Epistles: The Augustan Poetry Book and its Legacies 29
Fiction and Authenticity in the Letters of Euripides 53
Greetings from the Margin: Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 77
Part II: Editorial Fictions 97
Just Some Notes for My Own Use: Arrian’s (‘Arrian’s’?) Letter to Lucius Gellius 97
Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares: From Authentic Letters to Literary Artefact 115
Part III: Pseudepigraphic Fictions 139
The Latin Letters of Pseudo-Brutus (Cic. Brut. 1.16 and 1.17) 139
Fictionality and Pseudepigraphy in the Apocryphal Letter Exchange between Seneca and Paul 169
Part IV: Ekphrastic Fictions 189
Fictions in the Real World: Language and Reality in Cicero’s Letters 189
Let’s Get Real: Ekphrasis, Reality and Fiction in Pliny’s Epistles 215
List of Contributors 247
Bibliography 249
General Index 267
Index Locorum 271

Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes
Erscheinungsdatum: 18.09.2023

2023-09-08