Narratology and the Classics

Narratology (a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969), “a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation” (Jan Christoph Meister), has influenced classics mainly in its “classical”/structuralist version developed in the 1960s and 1970s in France by critics such as Roland Barthes, Todorov, Algirdas Greimas, Claude Julien Bremond, and Gérard Genette. A distinctive branch of German narratological studies (Erzähltheorie) represented by the works of Eberhard Lämmert, Käte Hamburger, or Franz Karl Stanzel had only a limited impact, almost exclusively on German-speaking classicists. The aim of this bibliography is to acquaint the reader with ancient authors whose study benefited from narratology, but it does not cover all narrative studies pertaining to Greek and Latin authors, though quite often in an inflationary use the term “narratology” is interchangeable with “narrative studies.”