Reception of Greek antiquity in historical fiction

Though reception studies have been at the heart of Classics for the past fifteen years, there has been a major gap right at the centre of the subject. While antiquity's reception in drama, film, poetry, and the history of classical scholarship Itself has been richly mined, the single largest and most complex body of material remains virtually untouched. Since 1822 there have been something over 450 novels of Greek antiquity published in English alone; yet the only extended study of this material is Ruth Hoberman's Gendering Classicism (a collection of essays on women novelists of both Greek and Roman antiquity).

Part of the reason for this neglect is that historical fiction as a genre has an extremely low critical profile in the English-speaking world, where it is still broadly viewed as a colony of the Walter Scott industry. The situation is very different in Germany, where historical fiction has long been a much more visible publishing category, and where there has been a long and rich history of critical engagement with the history, taxonomy, and significance of the genre, and especially with the interaction between the fictional narrative imagination and the philosophy of history. One of my incidental aims is to present this heritage of critical theory to English-speaking readers in an accessible and useful way, and in the process to make what I hope will be a significant contribution to the study of a badly neglected genre. Nevertheless, this is primarily a classicist's project, aimed principally at an audience who know the ancient world but are largely unfamiliar with its representation al a (mostly) popular level in this intimidatingly large corpus of material. It is, reluctantly, an essentially Anglophone project, though with glances at other national traditions where 1 have fell competent to venture some comparative remarks.
Hoberman aside, such work as there has been on fictions of antiquity has centred on Roman fiction, which has seen a small but important body of studies centred on the pagan/Christian conflict fiction of the nineteenth century and its legacy in twentieth-century film. But though Roman novels outnumber Greek by about five to one, the Greek material is actually more complex, interesting, and diverse. There is no master narrative to correspond to the Roman master plot of binary political and religious conflicts; the uniquely Greek interface between myth and history encourages complex negotiations between historical and fantastic fictional modes; and the investment of heroic value in particular individuals (most prominently Alciblades and Alexander) plays out the complexities of modem constructions of and engagement with a Hellenic ideal. And unlike the immense corpus of Roman fiction, the number of Greek novels is still (just) within the compass of a single reader, and Indeed I have now read all but a handful of the titles available in English. (A skeletal web bibliography, close to comprehensive though limited in details, already exists at www.rbul.ac.uk/Classics/NJL/novels.html.)
Though the focus is on prose fiction, my approach entails a wider engagement with fictional narrative recreations of Greece in other media, including theatre (from which the nineteenth-century tradition historically derives), film, television, and comics. Treatment of these other media is illustrative rather than comprehensive, since Greece on film is the subject of recent and imminent collections in Italian, German, and English, as well as of at least two UK PhDs. But these constructions of antiquity in the visual media are deeply embedded in a wider cultural context of popular narrative imaginings; thus much of what seemed provocative about Benioff & Petersen's Troy (2004) is entirely normative when contextualised against the background of twentieth-century novelisations of the matter of Troy from Rex Stout (1917) to Lindsay Clarke (2004). My aim is restore the novel to the centre of the story where it belongs.