While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.

Chapter 1 introduces the object of this monograph: to present a new reading of the complete works of Constantine Manasses, thereby offering a potential model for analysing other authorships based on commission and patronage. The primary focus here is on the key concept of occasional literature and its specific position between writer and patron, fiction and reality. The latter is defined in terms of two kinds of referentiality: on the one hand, the text’s connection to the occasion (pretext/performance); on the other, its (literary/potentially fictive) representation of a ‘reality’ that is relevant to that occasion. It is assumed that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional poetry and rhetoric had central positions, therefore called for a strong and individual voice of the author, since the voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.