A recent volume Storyworlds in Short Narratives: Approaches to Late Antique and Early Byzantine Tales, edited by Stavroula Constantinou and Andria Andreou in Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages, features two open-access chapters by our principle investigators and programme members, Ingela Nilsson and Christian Høgel. The volume offers offers a systematic approach to the early Greek tale, bringing together innovative theoretical approaches to storytelling and rarely discussed ancient Greek and early Byzantine tales. 

Both Retracing Connections contributions focus on the genre of paradoxography.  In “Telling a thauma in Hagiography and Paradoxography,” Christian Høgel analyses the similarities and differences in the use of miraculous tales in two of the most popular forms of literary production in Greek literature in general.  

Ingela Nilsson’s contribution, featured in Brill’s Kudos, uses “postclassical narratological ideas of literary worlds as mental models and possible worlds” to decipher the function of paradoxography. “To Render Unbelievable Tales Believable: The Storyworlds of Paradoxography” explores the storyworlds of desire in Late Antiquity and points to the immense “power of discourse to construct realities,” past and present.