Prof. Dr. Stefan Tilg

CV

Stefan Tilg is Professor of Latin at the University of Freiburg. His research focuses on ancient narrative, Neo-Latin literature, and reception studies. Among other titles he is the author of two books on the ancient novel (Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel, OUP 2010; Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: A Study in Roman Fiction, OUP 2014), and a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, OUP 2015.

Publications (Selection)

• Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010.

• Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: A Study in Roman Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014.

• The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, ed. by Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg, New York: Oxford University Press 2015.

• ‘The Novel’, in: A Companion to Greek Literature, ed. by Martin Hose and David Schenker, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell 2016, 256–65.

• Handbuch Historische Narratologie, ed. by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, Stuttgart: Metzler 2019 (own contribution on author/narrator in antiquity, pp. 69–81).

FRIAS-Project

What Was Fiction? Concepts and Practices of Fictional Narrative in Classical Antiquity

This project aims at a monograph with the working title What Was Fiction? Concepts and Practices of Fictional Narrative in Classical Antiquity. The exploration of ancient and, more generally, pre-modern ideas of fictionality is a desideratum. Despite countless publications on the topic of fictionality in recent years, premodern periods are rarely taken into account. Research is either completely ahistorical or focuses on the modern novel since the 18th century as the leading fictional genre. The planned monograph will a) consistently relate modern narratological theory and ancient narrative to one another; b) develop a transhistorical concept of fictionality on the basis of which modern and ancient ideas of fictionality can be compared; and c) within this common frame of reference, identify historical and cultural differences which are often rooted in the stronger presence of the ‘factual’ in ancient ‘fictional’ discourse. A major example of this cultural difference is the significance attributed to the (factual) author of a literary work as opposed to the (fictional) narrator: while in modern literary crititicism narrators are often sharply separated form authors, antiquity did not know the category of the narrator and developed other ways of thinking about authors and their texts.