In this hapless state I looked myself over and saw that I was now no bird, but an ass…’ In this ancient picaresque adventure, Lucius, an insatiably curious young man, finds himself transformed into a donkey after his fascination with black magic and witchcraft goes awry. While trapped in his new body, he becomes the property of thieves, farmers, cooks, soldiers and priests, and observes the hypocrisy and ineptitude of Imperial Roman society. The Golden Ass is considered the only novel to survive the Roman period, and the earliest novel to survive complete in the Western literary tradition. It is brimming with slapstick humour and sexual escapades, and foreshadows later works by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes and Chaucer, upon whom it was a direct influence.
100 Obras Maestras de la Literatura Universal : Edición enriquecida. Explorando la diversidad literaria a lo largo de los siglos
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jack London, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, José Rizal, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Herman Melville, Jonathan Swift, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Benito Pérez Galdós, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Defoe, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Virginia Woolf, Washington Irving, Juan Valera, Horacio Quiroga, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Voltaire, Apuleius, Leopoldo Alas, John Milton, José Martí, Lope de Vega, Emilio Salgari, Francisco de Quevedo, Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, José Zorrilla, Tirso de Molina, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Fernando de Rojas, L. Frank Baum, H.G. Wells, J.M. Barrie, H. Rider Haggard, H.P. Lovecraft, Seneca, Hans Christian Andersen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Shelley, Baltasar Gracián, Sófocles, Sun Tzu, Fiódor Dostoyevski, Antón Chéjov, León Tolstoi, Tomás Moro, San Agustín, Nikolái Gógol, Julio Verne, Homero, Platón, Alejandro Dumas, Aristóteles, Hermanos Grimm, Jorge Isaacs, Ignacio De Loyola, Nicolás Maquiavelo, Miguel Cervantes, Teresa de Jesús, Alejandro Dumas hijo, Mijaíl Bakunin, Miguel De Unamuno, Duque de Rivas, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Federico García Lorca, Gibrán Jalil Gibrán
