Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

The bucolic poetry of Theocritus is the first literature to invent a fully fictional world that is not an image of reality but an alternative to it. It is thereby distinguished from the other Idylls and from Hellenistic poetry as a whole. This book examines these poems in the light of ancient and modern conceptions of fictionality. It explores how access to this fictional world is mediated by form and how this world appears as an object of desire for the characters within it. The argument culminates in a new reading of Idyll 7, where Professor Payne discusses the encounter between author and fictional creation in the poem and its importance for the later pastoral tradition. Close readings of Theocritus, Callimachus, Hermesianax and the Lament for Bion are supplemented with parallels from modern contemporary fiction and an extended discussion of the heteronymic poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

• Offers a new theoretical approach which provides a better understanding of the origins of the pastoral genre • Explicitly comparative, making connections to other Hellenistic poetry and to modern contemporary fiction • Translates all Greek and Latin

Introduction: in the realms of the unreal; 1. The pleasures of the imaginary; 2. The presence of the fictional world; 3. Becoming bucolic; 4. From fiction to metafiction; Conclusion: the future of a fiction.