Ancient romance and medieval literary genres: Apollonius of Tyre

The story of Apollonius of Tyre is the only ancient romance that was known to the medieval West, where it was remarkably popular. Its narrative principle of random contingency served to differentiate it from dominant narrative assumptions in western medieval literature. Without the context of the Greek romances, medieval readers understood the story's provocative randomness in terms of other generic categories, and thus the way various late antique and medieval cultures responded differently to this same story provides clues about the operations of several distinct literary systems. Arguing for an historical approach to the study of literary genres, I examine the cultural import of selected Latin, Italian, and English appropriations of the story of Apollonius from c. 400 to c. 1600 AD.;In Chapter 1, I argue that the Historia Apollonii displays a dual generic allegiance, both to the openendedness of ancient Greek romances and to the more weighty proprieties of Late Latin literature. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Sulpicius Severus' Vita Martini makes use of the Historia Apollonii (thus dating the romance before 400 AD) in order to distance his hagiography from the aimlessness of romance. Chapter 3 examines how in the Sixth Century the figure of Apollonius came to stand for the instabilities of language and perspective faced by the poet Venantius Fortunatus.;In Chapter 4, I claim that the Old English Apollonius of Tyre responds to cultural anxieties of late eleventh-century England by questioning assumptions about royal authority and providential history. Chapter 5 contrasts Antonio Pucci's Apollonio di Tiro, a cantare which emphasizes life's temporal contingencies, to Boccaccio's employment of the Historia Apollonii in his Filocolo to differentiate romance and novellistic modes. Chapter 6 argues that in John Gower's Confessio Amantis the story of Apollonius stages a confrontation between two temporal logics of narrative--romance and exemplum--which governs the poem's engagement with its readers. An epilogue surveys how the story of Apollonius was read in light of the rediscovered Greek romances during the Renaissance and in Shakespeare's Pericles. Appendices provide editions of the Compendium libri Apollonii and of Pucci's Apollonio di Tiro.