ABSTRACT
But if these fictional texts are to be read in this way, we have to eschew any expectation that the novels represent directly the everyday world of their authors and readers. Even when the principal characters are on their home ground at the beginning and end of the story, theirs is a world with which the implied reader is assumed to be familiar, not from daily experience, but from reading. In addition, we have to make full allowance for the fact that these novels are predicated on a genre or type of fiction which had last flourished almost a fuU millennium before the twelfth-century writers took up the pen. This is not to reiterate the now discredited view that they are nothing more than 'imitations' of the Hellenistic novel.2 However, in order to see how these novels reinterpret the world for their own time, we have to make full allowance for the generic allusion which is built into every one of them. To make sense, these novels have to be read against their Hellenistic predecessors - with which, it is very clear, not only their authors but surely their intended first readers also, were deeply familiar.
