Reading Mistakes in Heliodorus

Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story was translated into English three times during the long eighteenth century and considered a model of the "romance or novel" throughout the century. This essay examines this important work to expand our sense of what texts constituted the "novel" in the eighteenth-century British print marketplace, and also to argue that Heliodorus himself addresses the issues of transmission and translation that define his place in literary history. The Ethiopian Story is a sophisticated and self-conscious narrative that critiques the archaic and foreign adventure stories it adapts. At the same time, Heliodorus complements his critique of these residual forms with self-conscious versions of them, which seek to preserve and even to amplify the strangely productive mode of reading such adventure stories enable. The Ethiopian Story offers a model of the novel, or romance, as a dialogic genre organized by the irreducible interplay between narrative self-consciousness and the pleasures of readerly mistakes.