Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction

Metaphors of the body form an important feature of Petronius' Satyricon. This book claims that the text can be read as a unified whole rather than as episodic jumble, despite its fragmentation. Presented as disturbing as well as comic, intricately structured as well as chaotic, the study asserts that the Satyricon's imagery constantly mirrors apparent paradoxes. Thus corporeality is explored as a metaphor rather than just as an index of the "low" genre of the novel.