Analyses the re-animating culture of imperial Greek culture, focusing on sophistic declamations, ethopoetic exercises, ‘close encounter’ descriptions and Homeric performance. Suggests how all these spaces reveal a strong and very textually engaged awareness of the concept of ‘doubleness’ (being and not being the subject of one’s impersonation). By reading these modes alongside depictions of performance from within the Posthomerica (Nestor’s song, the song of the bards and the debate between Ajax and Odysseus) argues for the direct influence that they exerted on Quintus’ composition, providing models for how to expand creatively within the boundaries of a canonical, traditional text.

Chapters Three, Four, Five and Six focus on the emergence of explicit maps as an integral element within popular genres and thus follow a rough chronology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Chapter Three explores the map in Adventure Fiction as it emerges in the late nineteenth century at a point when literary maps proliferate across texts and genres. This chapter offers a detailed reading of two iconic maps in Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines and seeks to show that visual and verbal meanings are fully integrated. In the final sections of the chapter, the concept of doubling in map and text is taken to its furthest extreme and works to create a new genre – the spy thriller. This is analysed with reference to John Buchan and full analysis of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. (139)