{"product_id":"9780199742653","title":"Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel","description":"\u003cbr\u003eWhere does the Greek novel come from? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to founding fathers within the tradition, the novel revelled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions (or at least affected to combine them: it is often hard to tell how 'authentic' the non-Greek material is). More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridisation, or what we would now call 'mixed-race' relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or 'dirtiness', of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression, transformation and mess. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. \u003cem\u003eDirty Love\u003c\/em\u003e focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and covers such texts as Ctesias' \u003cem\u003ePersica\u003c\/em\u003e,\u003cem\u003e Joseph and Aseneth\u003c\/em\u003e,\u003cem\u003e the Alexander Romance\u003c\/em\u003e and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal to those interested not only in Greek literary history, but also in near-eastern and biblical literature.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press, USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47022588952816,"sku":"9780199742653","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780199742653_p0.jpg?v=1763671640","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780199742653","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}