Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction

Petronius’ Satyricon, long regarded as the first novel of the Western tradition, has always sparked controversy. It has been puzzled over as a strikingly modernist riddle, elevated as a work of exemplary comic realism, condemned as obscene and repackaged as a morality tale. This reading of the surviving portions of the work shows how the Satyricon fuses the anarchic and the classic, the comic and the disturbing, and presents readers with a labyrinth of narratorial viewpoints. Dr Rimell argues that the surviving fragments are connected by an imagery of disintegration, focused on the pervasive Neronian metaphor of the literary text as a human or animal body. Throughout, she discusses the limits of dominant twentieth-century views of the Satyricon as bawdy pantomime, and challenges prevailing restrictions of Petronian corporeality to material or non-metaphorical realms. This ‘novel’ emerges as both very Roman and very satirical in its ‘intestinal’ view of reality.

• Makes an important contribution to feminist criticism through its exploration of metaphors of the body • Revises twentieth-century criticisms of Petronius, including seminal ideas of critics like Auerbach and Bakhtin • This book on Petronius sees this fragmentary work as unified on the level of imagery

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction: corporealities; 1. Rhetorical red herrings; 2. Behind the scenes; 3. The beast within; 4. From the horse’s mouth; 5. Bella intestina; 6. Regurgitating Polyphemus; 7. Scars of knowledge; 8. How to eat Virgil; 9. Ghost stories; 10. Decomposing rhythms; 11. Conclusion: licence and labyrinths; Appendices; Bibliography; Index of passages discussed; Index of subjects.