Reader Immersion in Latin Prose and Verse Narrative

Immersion used to be disregarded by academic scholarship as a secondary aspect of ancient narrative. It was mostly considered typical of a passive reading style unworthy of intellectual consideration. However, the study of the immersive strategies adopted by ancient authors can often reveal intriguing and sometimes unsuspected layers of sophistication in their works. This makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of ancient literary culture.

This is the first monograph that thoroughly analyses how Latin authors of narrative encourage their readers’ immersion in the fictional world--an aspect of fictional literature that is essential to fully understand the artistry and sophistication of many ancient texts. Immersed readers of fiction experience the narrative world and its inhabitants-the fictional characters-as if they were to some extent real. This experience affects the readers’ visual imagination, but also their emotional reactions, physical sensations, enactive responses, and interpretive activities; deeply engaging texts adopt various strategies to boost all these aspects of the reading experience they afford.

The book mobilizes the resources and methods of several scholarly approaches, both traditional and new, to explore these strategies in ancient prose and verse narratives. Detailed analysis of language and style is combined with a careful consideration of the more general features of ancient literary genres; narratology joins forces with the study of emotions and with neurocognitive perspectives.

Reader immersion is a pervasive aspect of all kinds of narrative literature, but it is more prominent in some texts than in others. In this study, Luca Graverini analyses a broad range of ancient narrative works, spanning several centuries and different literary genres. In purely chronological order, these include the comedies of Plautus, the Aeneid of Vergil, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the tragedies of Seneca, the Satyrica of Petronius, and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. The interpretive approach adopted in this monograph can attract the interest of many readers with different backgrounds and working on different subjects.

Luca Graverini, Professor of Latin Literature, University of Siena

Luca Graverini is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Siena. He has published extensively on Apuleius and other ancient Greek and Latin novels, focusing especially on intertextuality, cultural identity, genre markers, emotions, truth and fiction, and serious and comic intent. His other interests include Augustan poetry, Pompeian poetic inscriptions, and Latin popular literature.