This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel and investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society.
Panagiotis Roilos was born and raised in Greece. He studied at the University of Athens (B.A./Ptychion in Classics, Byzantine, and Modern Greek Literature, 1991) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1999). Professor Roilos’ publications and research interests center upon comparative poetics, postclassical Greek literature, historical and cognitive anthropology of premodern Greek culture, reception studies, medieval and modern literary theory, ritual theory, orality and literacy, European aestheticism (with a focus on Greek and British literature), German Romanticism and the classics, and the Enlightenment. Rolios shows that this interdiscursivity functions on two pivotal axes: on the paradigmatic axis of previously sanctioned ancient Greek and–less evidently but equally significantly–Christian literature, and on the syntagmatic axis of allusions to the broader twelfth-century Byzantine cultural context.

Image courtesy of interviewee. July 24, 2017