Menéndez Pelayo y sus estudios sobre las novelas griegas y latinas, antes y en sus Orígenes de la novela

The Doctoral Thesis of D. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo The novel among the Latins was read at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Madrid and published shortly after in Santander (Imprenta de Telesforo Martínez) in 18751. The first chapter of the Orígenes of the novel, entitled "Review of the novel in classical, Greek and Latin antiquity", written some thirty years later, would deal with the same topic again, in a more succinct way (only twenty-four pages in the 1961 CSIC edition), but taking into account this time not only the Latin novelists (Petronius and Apuleius), but also the Greeks (barely mentioned in his previous study). These are the two texts that we are going to consider here, taking into account the distance between them, and the interest of both in the perspective on the history of the novel as a literary genre.