This book traces the transmission and reception of one of the most influential novels in Western literature. The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety, tells of a young man changed into an ass by magic and his bawdy adventures and narrow escapes before the goddess Isis changes him back again. Its centerpiece is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche. Julia Gaisser follows Apuleius' racy tale from antiquity through the sixteenth century, tracing its journey from roll to codex in fourth-century Rome, into the medieval library of Monte Cassino, into the hands of Italian humanists, into print, and, finally, over the Alps and into translation in Spanish, French, German, and English. She demonstrates that the novel's reception was linked with Apuleius' reputation as a philosopher and the persona he projected in his works. She relates Apuleius and the Golden Ass to a diverse cast of important literary and historical figures--including Augustine, Fulgentius, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bessarion, Boiardo, and Beroaldo. Paying equal attention to the novel's transmission (how it survived) and its reception (how it was interpreted), she places the work in its many different historical contexts, examining its representation in art, literary imitation, allegory, scholarly commentary, and translation. The volume contains several appendixes, including an annotated list of the manuscripts of the Golden Ass. This book is based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 2000.

This book traces the transmission and reception of one of the most influential novels in Western literature. The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety, tells of a young man changed into an ass by magic and his bawdy adventures and narrow escapes before the goddess Isis changes him back again. Its centerpiece is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche. Julia Gaisser follows Apuleius' racy tale from antiquity through the sixteenth century, tracing its journey from roll to codex in fourth-century Rome, into the medieval library of Monte Cassino, into the hands of Italian humanists, into print, and, finally, over the Alps and into translation in Spanish, French, German, and English. She demonstrates that the novel's reception was linked with Apuleius' reputation as a philosopher and the persona he projected in his works. She relates Apuleius and the Golden Ass to a diverse cast of important literary and historical figures--including Augustine, Fulgentius, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bessarion, Boiardo, and Beroaldo. Paying equal attention to the novel's transmission (how it survived) and its reception (how it was interpreted), she places the work in its many different historical contexts, examining its representation in art, literary imitation, allegory, scholarly commentary, and translation. The volume contains several appendixes, including an annotated list of the manuscripts of the Golden Ass. This book is based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 2000.

Preface and acknowledgements / F. Bistagne, C. Boidin, and R. Mouren -- Apuleius' travels: historical and geographical diffusion -- The medieval Ass: re-evaluating the reception of Apuleius in the High Middle Ages / Robert H.F. Carver -- The White Goddess in Mexico: Apuleius, Isis, and the Virgin of Guadalupe in Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl sources / Andrew Laird -- The Ass goes east: Apuleius and orientalism / Carole Boidin -- The afterlife of Psyche -- How to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche: from Fulgentius to Galeotto Del Corretto / Julia Haig Gaisser -- Psyche's textual journey from Apuleius to Boccaccio and Petrarch / Igor Candido -- An Apuleian masque? Thomas Heywood's Love's Mistress (1634) / Stephen Harrison -- Echoes of Apuleius' novel in Mary Tighe's Psyche: Romantic imagination and self-fashioning / Regine May -- A fashionable model? Formal patterns and literary values -- Apuleius and Martianus Capella: reception, pedagogy, and the dialectics of canon / Ahuvia Kahane.

Faulkner's final novel, The Reivers, has been gently dismissed by scholars and critics as no more than its subtitle claims, A Reminiscence. Although the new millennium has seen a new appreciation for Faulkner's later novels, The Reivers is still perceived as a slightly fictionalized comic memoir romanticizing the early life of the author in the pre-civil rights American South. This volume takes this dismissal of The Reivers to task for failing to appreciate its employment of the Apuleian narrative of life-altering metamorphosis to offer, as his literary farewell, hope for humanity's self-redemption. Vernon L. Provencal studies the reception of The Golden Ass in The Reivers as comic novels of moral katabasis (wilful descent into the lawless underworld) and providential anabasis (societal and spiritual redemption). As the independent basis of the reception study, The Reivers receives its first ever detailed reading, while The Golden Ass is read anew from the teleological perspective offered by the (undervalued) prophecy that in the end the comic hero would become the book itself.

The contributions to this volume on the Isis Book reassess current interpretations, highlight aspects of text, language, and style, and develop new lines of approach regarding the interpretation of this fascinating many-layered text, the last book of Apuleius’ famous novel.

Does the story of Lucius, a curious and lustful young man who is magically transformed into an ass, have anything to teach us today? Does it have a serious, philosophical and religious meaning, or is it just a form of literary play, full of adventures, magic, sex, violence, and religion? This volume studies the reception of the novel in the last hundred years, showing also the most promising and diverse research perspectives for the future. Apuleius claimed that a philosopher must possess a mirror; perhaps, his novel is a mirror for us to look into.

Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the Lucianic Loukios, or the Ass depend on and play with readers’ familiarity with the clear patterns of Greek and Roman stories of metamorphosis. The formulaic nature of these stories suggests that the appearance of a god at the end of the Golden Ass is unsurprising and that the end of the Loukios is more innovative. This context also sheds new light on the function of the Cupid and Psyche story, the meaning of these works’ titles, and the lost Metamorphoseis on which they are both based and of which the Golden Ass is a translation.