Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference

Lucian’s writings raise questions about the nature of reading and viewing the lives of others; this book explores these questions through close readings of Lucian’s dialogues and stories. Lucian scholarship over the past decades has been dominated by terms like performance and personas, so this book asks simply: what happens when we are not performing? When we read or sit in the audience, we cannot perform for the world we are viewing. Nor can we act on our desires and beliefs, since we have no