Re Inventing Ovids Metamorphoses

This volume explores early modern recreations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers who freely handled the original text so as to adapt it to different artistic media and genres.

This study constitutes the first modern book-length, in-depth critical analysis of Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.623–14.582. In this unit Ovid, by challenging openly the artistry of his great predecessor Vergil, redraws the parameters associated with the definition and appreciation of epic poetry. The book first introduces the methodological complexity of the Ovidian embrace strategy, and, subsequently, it reads the ‘little Aeneid’ closely, discussing the network of allusions to its prototype. It assesses the structure and thematics of each episode in the cluster, and traces the recurrence of prominent motifs throughout the Metamorphoses. Not least, it explores poetics, arguing that Ovid’s selective incorporation of the Aeneid reproduces the spirit and fundamental ideas of the model in an idiosyncratic sophisticated manner.

Synthesizing a wealth of detailed observations, Joseph Solodow studies the structure of Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, the role of the narrator, Ovid's treatment of myth, and the relationship between Ovid's and Virgil's presentations of Aeneas. He argues that for Ovid metamorphosis is an act of clarification, a form of artistic creation, and that the metamorphosed creatures in his poem are comparable to works of art. These figures ultimately aid us in perceiving and understanding the world.

The main purpose of this book is to provide an introduction, in the form of a literary study, both to the major aspects of the Metamorphoses and to Ovid's basic aims in the poem. -- Book Jacket.

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative