R H's List: Paradoxography – related secondary literature

Paper presented at the 145th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association 2–5 January 2014, Chicago, IL

EXCERPT: The Alexander Romance, a historical novel composed between the late Hellenistic and High Imperial period, features over thirty letters inserted into the narrative framework. The drastic variation in length, content, and style of these letters has made it difficult to understand what role they play within the novel. Reinhold Merkelbach’s seminal study of the Alexander Romance in 1954 established a helpful distinction between the novel’s fantastical letters and those with a semblance of historical authenticity. However, neither Merkelbach nor successive scholars (Häag 1983, Rosenmeyer 2001) have established criteria for determining the historical plausibility of a given letter, or interrogated the author’s motives for embedding such letters into an explicitly fictional text. This paper remedies these methodological gaps first by determining what constitutes a historically plausible letter in the Alexander Romance, and then by explaining the purpose of historical letters within the novel at large.

In Cusset,Christophe; Le Meur-Weissman,N.; Levin,Fanny (eds.), 'Mythe et pouvoir à l'époque hellenistique,' Louvain-Paris-Walpole, MA: Peeters (Hellenistica Groningana, 18), pp. 339-352

ABSTRACT:
From the eighth to the fourteenth century, places of wonder and dread appear in a wide variety of genres in Old and Middle English: epics, lays, romances, saints' lives, travel narratives, marvel collections, visions of the afterlife. These places appear in narratives of the other world, a term which in Old and Middle English texts refers to the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, even Paradise can be fraught with wonder, danger, and the possibility of harm.

But in addition to the other world, there are places that are not theologically separate from the human world, but that are nevertheless both marvellous and horrifying: the monster-mere in Beowulf, the Faerie kingdom of Sir Orfeo, the demon-ridden Vale Perilous in Mandeville's Travels, or the fearful landscape of the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fraught with horror or the possibility of harm, these places are profoundly different from the presented or implied home world of the text.

My dissertation investigates how Old and Middle English narratives create places of wonder and dread; how they situate these places metaphysically between the world of living mortals and the world of the afterlife; how they furnish these places with dangerous topography and monstrous inhabitants, as well as with motifs, with tropes, and with thematic concerns that signal their marvellous and fearful nature. I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts. This overarching concern with displacement encourages the migration of iconographic motifs, tropes, and themes across genre boundaries and theological categories.

Bibliomanie 7 (2006)

Parthenius of Nicaea, ed. Lightfoot (1999) Parthenius of Nicaea: The Poetical Fragments and the Erotica Pathemata. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chapt. 4 'The Mythographer' discusses parallels with the Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα and other genres, including paradoxography; this chapter is open access though the rest of the book is not.

Hächler,Nikolas (2013) 'Observations of the Marvellous in Strabo’s Geographika: The Use of the Unreal for the Study of the World in Antiquity', in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Literature 2013

ABSTRACT
In his cultural geography, Strabo gathered important, useful and amusing information concerning the structure of earth's nature, its regions and the different peoples who inhabit the world. The author was therefore also interested in myths, paradoxographical facts and ethnographic characterisations of strange and extraordinary peoples, so that by analysing the wondrous accounts of his works in this overview, the reader gets a deeper understanding of the formation and handling of antique discourses of knowledge regarding the understanding of the world's composition.
By examining Strabo's use of myth, three points have to be considered: (1) Strabo tried to establish a connection between Homer’s epics and his own writings by explaining the poet's stories in an allegorical way. Thus he gathered geographical knowledge from epic writings and joined the ranks of important writers of the Ecumene. (2) Pure mythical stories of literary antecessors – except Homer – were critically reviewed and mostly rejected. (3) Mythic accounts of the cities of the Ecumene were not as much criticized, as seen as a part of their historical identity of the Ecumene.
During his studies concerning nature, Strabo encountered also paradoxographical records, which apparently expanded his knowledge of the world and remained wondrous, as long as he was not able to explain them according to the scientific theories of the time. Thus, one can investigate how antique patterns of explanation worked and came into use.
Finally, Strabo divided different peoples in three contrasting groups: (1) The inhabitants of the Ecumene appear as civilizing precursors (2) especially against partially hostile high cultures for example the Egyptians, the Indians and the Parthians. (3)They are also bound to conquer barbaric and mythical groups, like the Scythii or Amazones, whose customs seem amazing but also partly repellent.

Shannon, K.E. (2013) ‘Authenticating the Marvellous: Mirabilia in Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and Suetonius’, Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.9 (6/6/13)

Working Papers on Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature
"The aim of this page is to share research-in-progress with as wide a range of scholars as possible on topics connected with the main themes of the project."

Martínez, S. (2002) 'Demòstrat i Leònidas de Bizanci: l’art d’escriure sobre la pesca', Faventia 24 (2) pp.7-23. 

ABSTRACT (English; article in Catalan)
This paper analyses the extant fragments of Demostratus and Leonidas of Byzanz, prose writers about fishing; it emphasizes the paradoxographic element, their links with other writers about animals and their use of sources of information.

Jacob, Christian. (2011) 'Mise en ordre, mise en forme des savoirs: pour une approche comparative' —Paper delivered at conference Collection et Fragments. Recueils, collections et encyclopédie au Japon. 8 Sept 2011, Collège de France, Paris. 

ABSTRACT (English: the article is in French)
The focus of this paper is the construction and transmission of knowledge in scholarly texts in Classical Antiquity (Greece, Alexandria, Rome) and the way encyclopedias, compilations, collections of quotations and mirabilia organize and process informations. I discuss the way bits of information become artefacts, with a certain epistemic status. I also explore the ordering patterns of such collections, according to geography, history or various thematic threads.

García Moreno, L.A. 'Las navegaciones romanas por el Atlántico norte: imperialismo y geografía fantástica', in V. Alonso Troncoso (ed.), Guerra, exploraciones y navegación: el Mundo antiguo a la Edad moderna, La Coruña 1995, pp.101–110.

Zadeh, T. (2010) 'The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the 'Ajā'ib Tradition', Middle Eastern Literatures 13(1) pp.21–48

Abstract
In the introduction to the Arabic cosmology of marvels, 'Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā'ib al-mawjudāt ('Marvels of Creation and Rarities of Existence'), Zakariyyā' al-Qazwīnī (d. 682/1283) raises the issue of veracity in the narration of the wondrous. Central to al-Qazwīnī's exposition of the strange and marvellous is a sustained interest in the pleasure produced through the narration of elegant tales. Despite this aesthetic awareness, al-Qazwīnī returns repeatedly to the question of authenticity. For al-Qazwīnī, the estimation of these wondrous accounts also depends on their relative truth-value. This article traces the tension between the fictive and the real by exploring some of the Greek, Arabic, and Persian antecedents to al-Qazwīnī's phenomenology of creation.

Hardie, P. (ed), Paradox And The Marvellous In Augustan Literature And Culture. Oxford: OUP, 2009.

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION
The literature and art of Augustan Rome are often thought of as the product of an age of high classicism, characterized by maturity, balance, and harmony. This volume examines the presence of what might be seen as an unclassical love of paradox and the marvellous, and shows that it is an important strain in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, as well as in prose works of history and rhetoric, and in the Augustan visual arts. The volume includes chapters by some of the leading experts in the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. It will be of interest to all students of Roman literature and culture.

García Teijeiro, M.; Molinos Tejada, M.T. 'Paradoxographie et religion', Kernos 7 (1994) pp.273-285.

Baldwin, Barry (1995) 'Pliny the Elder and Mucianus', Emerita 63 (2) pp.291-301

ABSTRACT
The thirty-two fragments uniquely preserved by the elder Pliny from the writings of Vespasian's famous general Licinius Mucianus on mirabilia and other things are analysed in detail for their content and language. Some deductions about Mucianus' place of exile, the exact nature of his book, and Pliny's own use of it are at variance with those of other scholars, notably Syme. Pliny's varying attitudes towards Mucianus in the NH are explained in terms of tensions between Mucianus and Titus, with this having some bearing on the circumstances and date of Pliny's own book.

Higbie, C. 'Hellenistic Mythographers' in Woodard, R.D. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 pp237-254

"... Some Hellenistic scholars devoted themselves to attempting to restore what they believed to be the original version of a work. Their focus on the text then led them to produce commentaries and essays. Others saw in texts mines of material to be extracted for any number of uses. From this double opportunity - the need for texts to be explicated and the wealth of material contained within them - developed at least two genres, mythography and paradoxography, which flourished for some four centuries, from the mid-third century BC into the second century AD. Students of literature scanned texts and extracted from them material grouped around a theme or focus, such as stories of the weird or unusual (paradoxography) and stories about the gods and heroes (mythography). ..."

Jacob, C. and Mangani, G. ‘Nuove prospettive metodologiche per lo studio della geografia del mondo antico’ [1985?]

Lhermitte, J.-F., Conscience morale des animaux et perspective ethique dans l'oeuvre zoologique d'Elien de Preneste (Diss). University of Paris IV - Sorbonne, 2005

Micunco, M.S., La geografia nella Biblioteca di Fozio: il caso di Agatharchide (Diss), University of San Marino, 2008

Special edition of Annali Online di Lettere - Ferrara (2007)

Albaladejo Vivera, M., 'Algunas consideraciones críticas sobre los viajes de Eudoxo de Cícico', Gerión 25(1) 2007, 235-248

ABSTRACT (English; article in Spanish)
Some Critical Considerations about the Travels of Eudoxus of Cyzicus
The story about the travels to India supposedly undertaken by Eudoxus of Cyzicus has been kept remained in the work of Strabo, who grounded it on the writings of Posidonius. The tone of this story appears to me as not very realistic. In comparison with the news written by Cornelius Nepos, we clearly see paradoxographical aspects. They are, of course, literary ones. All this topics are included within the framework of the Hellenistic discussion on geographical questions, being one of the favourite the possible navigation around Africa