COLLOQUIUM: David Elmer, Harvard University, "Jealousies In and Of the Text in Chariton’s Callirhoe"

Chariton’s Callirhoe, earliest of the extant Greek novels, assigns a prominent role to zēlotupiā (“jealousy”), which not only functions as the driving force behind the plot, but also characterizes many of the novel’s embedded scenes of reading. This paper will explore the various ways in which zēlotupiā permeates Chariton’s text. Jealousy will be found to have a distinctly narratological aspect in the novel. Moreover, its foregrounding may be understood as a means of commenting on both the production and the reception of literary texts, above all the text of Callirhoe.