Framing the Ass

This volume complements and completes the project I began in Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (OUP, 2000). That book looked at Apuleius in his broader intellectual context as a Latin representative of the Second Sophistic, and surveyed all his works from that angle in the form of a scholarly handbook. Alongside this, I have over the last twenty years published and developed a body of work on the literary texture of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, which argues a similar case through particular focus on the novel (which received only a single long chapter in the 2000 book, necessarily summary in nature). In this body of work I aim to demonstrate in detail the literary sophistication and complex intergeneric intertextuality which is the key feature of Apuleius’ novel, and to say something about the history and development of scholarship on the Metamorphoses and its relationship to the change in evaluation of Apuleius as writer which has taken place over the last generation.