Bryan Reardon (1928-2009) was one of the most important and influential
figures in the revival of scholarly interest in the Greek novel and
ancient fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His
organisation of the first International Conference on the Ancient Novel
(ICAN) at Bangor, North Wales, in 1976 was a landmark in the field and
an inspiration to the organisers of subsequent ICANs, from which Ancient
Narrative itself sprang. As editor of Collected Ancient Greek Novels
(University of California Press 1989; second edition 2008), he made the
Greek novels accessible to a wider readership and won a place for them
in university syllabuses across the English-speaking world.
This volume contains twenty essays by leading scholars of ancient
fiction, who were all pupils, colleagues or close friends of Bryan
Reardon, in memory of his scholarship, energy, guidance and humanity.
They cover a range of topics including ancient literary theory and the
conceptualisation of fiction, discussion of individual novels (Chariton,
Longus, Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Apuleius) and novelistic texts
(a papyrus fragment of a lost novel, and Philostratus' Life of
Apollonius), the afterlife of the ancient novel (in a Renaissance
commentary on Roman law, in a seventeenth-century essay on the origin of
the novel, and in a seventeenth-century series of paintings in a French
château), and a speculative reconstruction of the morning after the end
of Heliodorus' novel. The title of the volume commemorates two of Bryan
Reardon's most important books: Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et
IIIe siècles après J.-C. (Paris 1971) and The Form of Greek Romance
(Princeton 1991); and the photograph of Aphrodisias on the front cover
is a tribute to his critical edition of Chariton (2004).
