Morrison, Andrew Donald; (2002) The narrator's voice: Hellenistic poetry and Archaic narrative. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis presents a comprehensive study of the ways in which the Hellenistic poets Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes use Archaic poetic models for the construction of their primary narrators (the first-level conduit of the events of the story to the audience). The broad approach of the thesis is correspondingly narratological, but it eschews the formalism of much previous narratological work, to produce a more complete view of the persona of the primary narrators in different texts. The thesis shows that the personas of primary' narrators are highly developed in Archaic poetry, particularly outside hexameter epic, in poets such as Archilochus, Hesiod and Pindar. The nature of these primary' narrators is studied in depth, close attention being paid to the portrayal of the relationship between the narrator and the historical author, the use of "quasi-biography" (indications of an external life for the narrator), the creation of an impression of extempore composition ("pseudo-spontaneity"), and the creation of the feeling for the audience of being admitted to a closed group ("pseudo-intimacy"). The particular adaptation of such features in Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius is examined in detail. Such features are regularly used in these poets to ironise their narrators, to allude to particular instances of these features in Archaic poetry or to create Hellenistic analogues and developments of Archaic effects (e.g. Callimachus' "mimetic" hymns). From these adaptations it is clear that Homer is not the exclusive model for Hellenistic poets, but that they draw extensively on non-epic Archaic poetry. The implications of such adaptations for Hellenistic poetics are also drawn out - "programmatic" passages of Hellenistic poetry strongly parallel Archaic models in function, and cannot be read as context-less statements of literary criticism, while the use of Archaic models from a variety of genres does not imply the rejection of genre and genre-norms.

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