This chapter argues that the Alexander Romance mounts a subversive critique of rhetorical education in the Roman world. Though long dismissed as ahistorical fantasy, the novel draws extensively on the declamatory school tradition, only to parody its constraints and elevate Alexander as a master rhetorician beyond the reach of paideia. Through close readings of episodes involving Aristotle, the Attic orators, Darius, and the Theban flautist Ismenias, the chapter shows how the Romance reframes Alexander not as a pupil of canonical figures but as their superior and eventual replacement. By satirizing epistolary fiction, impersonation exercises, and the “travel advisories” suasoriae from chapter 4, the novel rewrites Classical history to suit Alexander’s anti-sophistic persona. His distinctive voice – described as “divinely inspired” – becomes the true marker of kingship and character, in contrast to the pedantry of rhetorical mimesis. Ultimately, the Romance envisions an alternative model of fiction mastery and learning that dethrones classical exempla and reconfigures the boundaries of elite education.

This theoretical chapter first proposes, within an open dynamic approach, a vocabulary to address the embodied person and their experience, and the material, social and symbolic environments in which they live, which are experienced physically, relationally and interpreted via semiotic processes. Then, it highlights the implications of a regional case study for the theorising of human development, notably, thanks to its attention to the interdependency between socio and microgenetic dynamics and ontogenesis. Further, it proposes a new series of concepts and dynamics to account for development in older age, where people are likely to find new ways to develop in a world whose forces may feel progressively more adverse. Hence, the model of reconfiguration of domains of conduct needs to be completed by an understanding of envelopes that supports centripetal dynamics, borrowed from psychoanalysis. Finally, the chapter examines the implication of this proposition for the theorising development in the lifecourse.

This chapter introduces the book’s two major claims: that learning to read and write fiction was integral to literate education in the Roman world, and that Imperial prose fiction emerged in response to this pedagogy. Drawing on a wide range of literary, philosophical, and educational sources, it argues that the acquisition of “fiction competence” – the trained ability to identify, interpret, and evaluate fictional narratives – was central to the curriculum from early childhood through rhetorical education. It then proposes an “institutional theory of fiction” for classical antiquity, arguing that ancient fictionality be defined not by genre or authorial intent but by culturally embedded conventions taught through schooling. Tracing the roots of these conventions to Greek philosophical and sophistic traditions, the chapter reconstructs four pedagogical principles that structured how students learned to engage with fiction. These principles centered on deception (apate), enigmatic speech (ainigma), and evaluative criticism. The chapter demonstrates that educational texts and practices shaped ancient readers’ expectations of fiction and that literary fiction, in turn, reflected and contested its institutional training. Fiction in antiquity, the chapter contends, must be understood as a socially regulated practice, embedded in and shaped by systems of education.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.

Allen Ginsberg’s fastidiousness about retroactively dating three decades of his own photographs in the 1980s is a significant part of a historiographical project. Ginsberg strives to document his role in the creation of a movement that enables viewers to perceive self-portraits and individual portraits of other key Beat figures such as Kerouac as communal objects. Ginsberg’s inscriptions couple the author’s penchant for mythmaking with his interest in narrating events that are made significant through their incorporation into a composition that suggests a heightened meaning for each individual image. Collecting the ninety-one portraits in Allen Ginsberg: Photographs, placing them in a roughly chronological order, and providing information about each image through captions that feature the date of composition, the place in which the image was taken, and how each subject contributed to the Beat movement or to subsequent countercultural movements such as hippie and punk that Ginsberg regards as part of the Beat legacy, the poet displays his interest in what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory regards as the creation of “collective memory.”

Ginsberg was famous for chronicling every facet of his life, and his last poems in the mid 1990s frequently reflect an intense self-consciousness about his final illnesses. While earlier in his career, the body was an important site for Ginsberg’s poetics of candor, confrontation, and erotic epiphanies, he remained equally adamant as his health faltered in ascertaining his physical deterioration in poems such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Sphincter.” Even during his final period, however, Ginsberg’s level of literary fame provided him access to figures in popular music that amplified his cultural prominence and enabled him to retain a sense of artistic relevance. Simultaneously with his meditations on death, Ginsberg’s culminating poems maintained his renowned sly humor about his social status as a writer whose expansive cultural reputation included the continuity of radical political critique. This chapter on his posthumous volume Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997 (1999) explores Ginsberg’s attempts to reconcile the problematic contexts of fame’s durability while struggling to find succor, in both Buddhist and poetic terms, with his accelerating disability and terminal departure.

This chapter examines the Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre as a revisionist shipwreck fiction that repurposes epic paradigms. The chapter reads the Cyrenean episode (chs. 11–24) as a sustained imitation – and critique – of Homer’s Phaeacia and Vergil’s Carthage. Unlike Odysseus or Aeneas, Apollonius resists narrative concealment and erotic distraction, instead reasserting his identity through skill, performance, and pedagogy. His learned character transforms a Phaeacian paradise into a classroom and converts a Didonian princess into a regina docta. The chapter argues that the novel appropriates the tropes of “bad” fiction to redefine the genre as morally and intellectually edifying. The text enacts a metaliterary defense of fiction, presenting Apollonius as an alternative heroic model who surpasses canonical predecessors in virtue and wisdom. The novel thereby mounts a serious challenge to the status of canonical epic, reimagining prose narrative as a vehicle for paideia. In this reading, the Story of Apollonius emerges not as an escapist tale but as a learned fiction that invites its readers to decode, critique, and ultimately embrace the educative potential of prose romance.

Sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse, which examines the development of the persons in their changing environments, offers here the frame for our exploration of development in older age. Although it has largely addressed the development of children, youth and adults, it has only recently started to approach the specificities of developing with age. This chapter retraces the ontological and epistemological foundation of this approach. It then further explores three sets of concepts of foremost importance when approaching development in the lifecourse into older age: those related to dynamics of distancing and imagining, core when examining semiotic processes in human development; those of interests and engagements, which emphasise sense-making and affects; and what regards the domains of conduct in which people engage. The chapter then sketches the specificities of development in older age within people’s material, social and symbolic environment.