Reader immersion in Latin prose and verse narrative

Immersed readers of narrative experience the fictional world and its inhabitants—the fictional characters—as if they were, to some extent, real. This experience influences not only the readers’ visual imagination, but also their emotional responses, physical sensations, enactive reactions, and interpretive activities. Deeply engaging texts use various strategies to boost all these aspects of the reading experience; in this regard, Latin prose and verse narratives are arguably no different from modern and contemporary ones, though immersive strategies of course may differ. Their study often reveals intriguing and sometimes unsuspected layers of sophistication in ancient fiction, despite the fact that immersion is often disregarded by academic classicists as a secondary aspect of narrative. The book mobilizes the resources and methods of several scholarly approaches, both traditional and new, to explore how ancient narratives try to seduce their readers into entering the fictional worlds they create. Detailed analysis of language and style is combined with a careful consideration of the more general features of ancient literary genres; narratology joins forces with the study of vividness and emotions, and with neurocognitive perspectives. A wide range of ancient narrative works is analysed. In purely chronological order, these include Plautus’ comedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s tragedies, Petronius’ Satyrica, and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.