Despite the insistence of many English literature graduates, the novel isn't the creation of Defoe or Fielding or even Cervantes. Its pedigree goes back to the classical world. Caligula, Nero or Marcus Aurelius might well have put their feet up after a hard day's emperoring and enjoyed a good yarn. And it's not just the novel that's ancient. The hard sell isn't a recent invention either: "I have set the story out in four books as a delightful possession for all mankind. It will remedy disease, solace grief, bring fond recollections to him that has loved, and instruct him that has not loved."

This passage is from the introduction to Daphnis and Chloe by someone called Longus. Only a handful of texts have survived and virtually nothing is known about their authors, the background of the stories, or indeed their intended readership. You only have to read the title of Tim Whitmarsh's Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel (and see its price  £60) to realise that this is an academic book, but it's only in the last century that heavy-duty scholarship has been applied to these works.

The ancient novel seems to have had little respect from the critics of its era, but then, the "modern" novel was generally regarded as lightweight, romantic and melodramatic until the French and the Russians beefed it up in the 19th century. The ancient texts are bizarrely similar to a lot of what is considered now as commercial fiction: love stories, adventures abroad, last-second escapes from doom, courtroom drama, unexpected resurrections. Pulp. They never had the academic glory enjoyed by Homer or Virgil, but they continued to be read and influenced many of the European greats such as Racine, Goethe and Shakespeare.

Whitmarsh, who also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel and translated one of the major texts, Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, has produced a highly intelligent study that is indubitably the result of profound meditation on the texts. There is hardly a sentence that is unaccompanied by a footnote or a hard reference. I wouldn't and couldn't argue with a man who knows his subject this well.

Two things struck me reading this book. First, someone should compile a monthly top 10 of literary critics from the number of citations they get. The predictability of the roll-call does make me laugh. It seems now impossible to publish an academic work without mentioning Foucault, Derrida or Lacan, although with his relentless diligence, Whitmarsh goes further afield to Althusser, Bakhtin, and Ricoeur, in addition to invoking all the stars of the classics faculties. I'm not dismissive of any of the above, but couldn't we have some new names, or indeed bring back Quiller-Couch?

Second, I feel there's an unspoken unease in the literature faculties that they're seen as idlers dipping into poetry and stories, a nagging embarrassment that they are high-class usherettes of an auditorium of mere entertainment. That's why so much of the appreciation of literature isn't about literature  take the popularity of the post-colonial courses: there's all that important stuff about history, politics, economics, race, identity.

Not that the erudition of the ancient pulp-merchants should be overlooked. For example, Whitmarsh offers a learned close reading of the opening of Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story. However, I vividly remember reading this for the first time, blind as it were, and being gob-smacked by it, simply because it's such powerful story-telling, so modern, so cinematic but written so long ago.

To survive you have to have an emotional impact, and these texts are important because however cracked and dirty they are (and some are much more readable than others), they are mirrors in which we can see ourselves. Anyone studying the history of the novel should take a look at Whitmarsh's book.