"Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel will cause a fundamental shift in how we think about the ancient novel, its authors and its content, as well as the implications for understanding literary texts that are lumped into this genre." -- Journal of Hellenic Studies "Destabilizing the still-common assumption that novels "originated," in any meaningful sense, among Greeks, Dirty Love will be a helpful addition to individual and institutional libraries featuring studies on literature and culture in the ancient world." -- Michael Kochenash, Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, Religious Studies Review "An enormously stimulating journey through a wide range of texts, relative to the environment out of which the Greek novel emerged. The stress laid throughout on the novel's willingness, even eagerness, to cross cultural boundaries carries conviction regardless of whether the arguments of individual chapters stand or fall. Dirty Love should be required reading for any future course in the Greek novel, and for anyone who wishes to dip further into one of the topics that it touches on, the rich footnotes on every page attest to the depth of scholarship throughout." -- Sara R. Johnson, Phoenix "Whitmarsh's argument is bold and original, and part of a larger endeavor, he says, to revise our understanding of classical Greek literature by locating it in a wider horizon in which Greekness itself is interrogated. In sum, this is a rich and stimulating book.

" --Bryn Mawr Classical Review "If you have some interest in the origins of the novel, the classical world or the roots of Western civilisation, you'll enjoy this. I felt cleverer after reading it." Tibor Fischer, Standpoint "Path-breaking, elegant, and breathtakingly erudite. Whitnarsh rewrites the history of ancient Mediterranean literature as well as the ancient Greek novel. Indispensable reading for cultural historians everywhere." --Edith Hall, King's College London "An acknowledged expert in Greek literature under the Empire, Whitmarsh here focuses the high beam of his vast erudition on other cultures (notably, Egyptian, Persian, Jewish) to offer a new understanding of the place of Greek fiction in a hybridized world from Hellenistic times onward, one that will stimulate as well as provoke the reader to reconsider long accepted ideas." --Froma Zeitlin, Princeton University.