This volume, part of the Greek Culture in the Roman World series, contributes to scholarship on the Second Sophistic, Lucian and the ancient novel. Lucian is not as much the study's focus as he is the gateway to several texts from the Roman Empire that modern audiences classify as fiction. N.M. situates Lucianic texts amidst an ‘eclectic’ group of contemporary works to demonstrate the range of ways authors negotiated the fictionality of their writing in a culture preoccupied by (in)authenticity and a continued fondness for spectacle (p. xi). For N.M., these authors respond to a status anxiety about their belatedness in their literary tradition by disrupting the various privileges given to texts that both precede and supersede them. By experimenting with concepts of time, engaging with their works' materiality, and/or incorporating scholarly conventions, for example, the authors N.M. highlights create a more dynamic relationship with the Graeco-Roman canon. She uses Lucian's ‘systematic and quasi-theoretical’ ideas about the experience of fiction as a guide for these facets of the period (p. 31). Identifying occurrences of this type of experimentation in non-literary contexts, she also gives readers a glimpse into the fascinating world of the Second Sophistic, arguing it bears significant resemblance to postmodern consumer culture.
N.M. begins the first chapter with Lucian's beginnings, the prolaliai. Entitled ‘Lucian's Promethean Poetics: Hybridity, Fiction, and the Postmodern’, the chapter explores Lucianic prologues to argue three points: (1) the hybrid creatures that recur there refer to Lucian's understanding of his works' iconoclastic postclassicism; (2) Lucian adopts the original hybrid craftsman, Prometheus, as an icon because he too subverts the usual hierarchy between predecessors/successors and originals/fakes; (3) Lucian and select peers embrace ‘anarchic’ poetics in order to liberate themselves from a rigid classicism and reflect the ‘semiotic overload’ of their contemporary world (p. 17). To make the first two points, N.M. uses traditional methods to produce skilful close readings. For the third, she draws on Umberto Eco's semiotic theories and T. Whitmarsh's analyses of narrative's role in figuring Greek identity during the Roman Empire. Anticipating that ‘hyperreality’ and ‘postmodernity’ might seem less than useful and anachronistic terms for fiction from the second century a.d., she knowingly defends her choices early on. Explaining that ‘to describe a work of art as “postmodern” is to make a statement about its qualities in relation to its era or culture [sic]’, she reassures her readership that the recognised tendency for works from the high Roman Empire to parody, ironise and experiment have deeper roots there than in the increasingly globalised West of the twenty-first century (pp. 24–5). She attributes the period's observable interest in parody, irony and metafiction to ‘a perplexity about how [sic] we know what we know and about what constitutes truth – with a pleasure in the fake’ (p. 25). This combination leads to the hyperrealism cited in the book's title, the self-conscious vying between and sometimes triumph of the illusory and/or fake (i.e. simulacrum) over the actual and/or authentic.
Analyses in the last three chapters take significant strides in supporting why one should read these texts this way. Readers of Lucian and the ‘novelists’ will most likely already be familiar with facets of their metafictional play, but N.M. supports her analyses of well-known scenes with a keen eye on materiality, spatial relations and the psychology of reading. Her interpretation of the correspondence between spatial boundaries within the narrative of Antonius Diogenes' The Incredible Things Beyond Thule and the boundaries of the material text stands out in Chapter 5 because N.M. explains how they compel readers to rejig the limits of their credulity outside of the textual encounter. Drawing on concepts from Gennette's Palimpsests, she begins to connect newly developing reading conventions and technologies to these texts' constant negotiation of their fictionality as well as the reader's negotiation of immersion within a story and detachment from it. N.M. reveals the depth of similarities between Lucian's poetics and the novelists' to good effect. Further parallels between novelistic strategies and strategies used by Galen reaffirm that fictionality and facticity are not givens sought after by authors of prose fiction alone, but a balancing act necessary for authors trying to expand the boundaries of what can be valued as cultural knowledge at any stage of a literary tradition. In Chapter 6, threads from the previous five chapters come together to describe how Lucian discredits traditional literary motifs, physical borders, temporalities and even spellings in True Histories to upend a derivative's subservience to an original. In the conclusion, N.M. shows the particularity of Graeco-Roman spectacle and wonder culture in this period to disambiguate it from already well-trod considerations about such matters in Roman society. In this chapter, especially, the reader senses how Lucian and the novelists can exist at the margins of literary culture while exemplifying larger cultural movements. The chapter also reminds readers that canons form in relation to contemporary interests that might seem rather far afield.
In the preface, N.M. addresses important aspects of her approach. Eschewing claims of comprehensiveness, she acknowledges that True Histories receives a significant proportion of the study's attention. Following the lead of Lucian and Galen, she points to a forthcoming project that will more thoroughly probe the wonder culture of the Second Sophistic. She also highlights the cumulative nature of her analyses. Readers should take these caveats seriously. One cannot ignore how little of Lucian's corpus gets attention, especially in relation to the amount devoted to the ancient novels. Of course, their relatively few numbers might make them easier to use as analytical analogues. Nevertheless, Lucian, like Plutarch, offers so many texts that a claim about his ‘systematic and quasi-theoretical’ approach to literature would benefit from including more of his corpus. Secondly, by delaying sustained scrutiny of the wonder culture beyond literary texts until the book's latter half, N.M.'s readers could lose their grasp on the importance of textual phenomena amidst a substantial amount of theoretical concepts and terminology. Moreover, Pausanias is not mentioned until the final chapter. Since his works typify many of N.M.'s points about the physical world deferring to an imaginary landscape, referring to his Description of Greece could have done some of the conceptual heavy lifting earlier in the book. The conclusion does much to resolve these considerations, though, and reading the opening chapters in light of it bolsters one's appreciation for N.M.'s attentiveness and for the value of her theoretical framework.
Furthermore, while there is obviously much to gain by drawing heavily on the work of Eco and Genette, N.M.'s interests may have also been served by more recent work in postcolonialism, media studies and performance studies. One wonders if the hypertexts of the last fifteen years, the latest developments in virtual reality and even the ever crumbling fourth wall in theatre, television and film would not have given N.M. more fodder for her consideration of metalepsis and its ontological consequences. On this score, her mention of the Kindle functions well as a comparandum for changes to the material conditions of reading in antiquity.
But these are mere quibbles. The volume succeeds in provoking its audience to reconsider the limits of rigid periodisation, to recognise reading as a simultaneously intellectual, affective and performative experience and, like N.M., to probe the inventive richness of Lucian's corpus in order to understand better the world which he exemplified.
