The erotic kiss in ancient and Byzantine novels

This essay offers an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of the erotic kiss in some ancient and Byzantine novels, namely Daphnis and Chloe, Leucippe and Clitophon, and Hysmine and Hysminias, where it features as an elaborate practice with underlying (if competing) theories regarding its utility. The essay demonstrates that in these novels, the kiss invokes the various ‘turns’—material, spatial, temporal, dermatological, vocal, and briefly, animal and vegetal—that have lately inflected the humanities. Additionally, the erotic kiss as subject, object, and act, pushes to the foreground the tensions embodied in period conceptions of real presence.