International Conferences on the Ancient Novel (ICAN): The Intellectual Growth of an Idea, the Explosion of a Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 12-17 July 1976, at University College of North Wales, Bangor, B.P. Reardon organized ICAN I. After conference he edited a volume entitled Erotica Antiqua (1977), which was a record of opening session plus dinner and speaker; names of speakers and titles of their papers (49 in number; by country: UK 17, USA 8, Canada 7, Germany 4, France 3, The Netherlands 3, Spain 3, Italy 1, Mexico 1, New Zealand 1, Romania 1); names and addresses (without email) of 75 participants; longish abstracts of each paper; detailed menu with wine list, presider, and speaker at conference dinner. The concluding reception was held at house of Bryan and Janette Reardon. He notes that the idea took shape in my mind for holding a meeting of scholars interested in ancient novel and an occasion offered itself in coming centenary, in 1976, of Rohde's major study Der griechische Roman ... The Times (price 12 pence), 17 July 1976, reported conference. The sainted J.P. Sullivan and I made journey to Bangor from London by train in a second-class car but with a first-class hamper from Fortnum and Mason. Of 75 participants at least 19 have died, and 15 are still active in novel studies. The organizer of ICAN I died 6 November 2009; at ICAN III (2000) in Groningen his students and colleagues (those who took part in ICAN I) had held a surprise dinner for him and Janette. Photographic records (35 mm film) of ICAN I were destroyed in development process, but group photographs of ICAN II (1989), III (2000, in color) and ICAN IV on-line, are precious mementos. That Reardon chose to hold conference in July is owing to one or two considerations or to a combination of them: he wanted to wait for warmth--or at least until ice melted; he wished to commemorate oft-repeated statement made by Ben Edwin Perry, The Ancient Romances (Berkeley 1967, 175) that ancient novel was conceived on a Tuesday afternoon in July. ICAN I accomplished many things: gathering of so many good scholars gave respectability to study of ancient novel and reassured younger scholars that here was a valid field awaiting development; large number of seminal ideas given voice resonated in minds of participants and enriched their research and teaching; most popular genre in contemporary literature is novel, and it was shown to have originated like epic, lyric, and drama in ancient world, and though purveyors of modern literature are reluctant to admit it, novel first arose in classical world and not in 17th or 18th century Britain, France, or Spain; ideas discussed at ICAN I demonstrated to all in attendance that what they were doing was worth a grown man's time. Perhaps we might date beginning of explosion of interest in ancient novel to publication of influential The Ancient Romance (1967) by Ben Edwin Perry, but it seems more likely because of timing and size of blossoming that we should date it around period after 1976 and ICAN I. Because of effects of ICAN I, founders of Petronian Society Newsletter (PSN) enlarged its scope beyond Petronius in 1979 (vol. 10.2) to encompass all Greek and Latin novels, all so-called fringe novels (e.g., The Life of Aesop), and all fragments of ancient novels. The quality of research and quantity of publications ancient novel has grown dramatically. The Bangor conference had its light moments. In an after-dinner paper Stephanie West (with a straight face) reported discovery of new fragments of a novel papyri, which, however, she had made out of whole cloth. Some in audience accepted her imaginings as fact. It was not until 1989, 13 years after ICAN I, that ICAN II was held at Dartmouth College, under guidance of James Tatum. Dartmouth is located in far northeast of USA, in Hanover, New Hampshire just across Connecticut River from Vermont. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".