Epilogue

Abstract

Abstract The book concludes with an epilogue that shows how the history of the novels’ readership has shaped our contemporary, scholarly understanding of the ancient genre and how critical attention to some of the oldest questions about the Greek novels can prompt new avenues for their interpretation. On the one hand, the ancient novels’ interests in Egypt and Ethiopia were central to the genre’s earliest Western European readers and interpreters, as they mapped the exploration and colonization of the Americas onto the travels of the ancient novels’ fictional protagonists. On the other, such a comparison shows how the novels’ narratives themselves already resisted the very ideas that they had put in motion.