An I for an I: reading fictional autobiography 1
An I for an I: reading fictional autobiography 1
This chapter begins with Augustine of Hippo’s curious assumption, in The City of God, that in The Golden Ass the claim to have been transformed into a donkey was Apuleius’, rather than that of the fictional narrator, Lucius. Why should Augustine have made such a glaring error? The chapter argues that antiquity lacked a strong sense of ‘the narrator’ (as distinct from ‘the author’). What we tend to call ‘first-person’, antiquity would have understood as ‘fictional autobiography’, in which the author illusionistically impersonates the narrating character.
Keywords: Apuleius, The Golden Ass, fictional autobiography, Augustine
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