Sub-project 1.2 (Historiographic and Narrative Literature - Egyptology/Hebrew Bible)
Dr. Joseph Cross conducts an in-depth analysis of Demotic narrative literature, concentrating on novellas such as Papyrus Spiegelberg. He broadens his exploration by comparing these texts and their literary characteristics with narrative texts from the Hebrew Bible.
In his book project "The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella," Dr. Cross studies techniques of plot composition in Persian and Hellenistic Egyptian and Judean narrative literature. In dialogue with narratology, he characterizes their literary art as complex and resolutely learned and shows how stories about the imagined past became cultural touchstones for scribes. In addition, using sociolinguistics he has found traces of performativity in an ambiguous passage in one Demotic novella extant in several versions and connected it to contexts of literary reception ("Appearance and Reality in Setna's Dialogue with ‘Pharaoh’ in First Setna 5.31-35," in Aurore Motte and Victoria Almansa-Villatoro (ed.), (Im-)Politeness in Ancient Egyptian Texts (Brill, Studies in Pragmatics), in press.)
Similarly, he has modelled textual fluidity in manuscripts of another novella as performance-based creativity ("Mouvance and the Art of Fiction in Performance in Manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian Novella," Manuscript and Text Cultures 2/2 (2023), 168-200.)
He has also interpreted the style of the opening lines of Judean novellas in their scribal contexts as sophisticated literary play ("The Style of the Opening of the Judean Novella," Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 14 (2025), in press.)
Taken together, his work brings to light the outlines of an international culture of literary storytelling found in marginalized communities of indigenous Judean and Egyptian scribes.