Aldo Tagliabue

Research Interest: Greek and Latin novel, literature of the imperial era, narratology, cognitive studies, early Christian literature, reception studies.

Prof. Tagliabue's first research focus is on the ancient novel, both in its simplest and most sophisticated forms: during his PhD he offered a reassessment of Xenophon's Ephesiaca as a paraliterary text, and, afterwards, he developed an intertextual and intermedial analysis of two relevant sections of Heliodorus' Aethiopica.

Prof. Tagliabue's second research focus is on the experiential representation of the divine in both Pagan and Christian texts written in the Imperial era. Through the analysis of a selected corpus including The Shepherd of Hermas and Aristides' The Sacred Tales, he has identified two main narrative strategies which promote the readers' experience of the divine: the narration of embodied epiphanies of ancient gods, and the apparent interruption of chronology within specific sections of a given text. Tagliabue sees this latter device as an original attempt within ancient literature to mirror the transcendence of divine time through narrative form.

Selected list of publications:

With J. Grethlein and L. Huitink (eds.), Experience, Narrative and Criticism in Ancient Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2019.

Xenophon's Ephesiaca: a Paraliterary Love-story from the Ancient World, Groningen: Barkhuis, Groningen University Library, Fall 2017.

'Learning from allegorical images in the Book of Visions of The Shepherd of Hermas,' Arethusa 50.2, 221-255, 2017.

'Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales: a study of the creation of the "narrative about Asclepius,'" Classical Antiquity 35.1, 126-146, 2016.

'Heliodorus' Aethiopica and the Odyssean Mnesterophonia: an intermedial reading,' TAPA 145.2, 445-68, 2015.

CV