Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination

Description

Central to Ovid's elegiac texts and his Metamorphoses is his preoccupation with how desiring subjects interact and seduce each other. This major study, which shifts the focus in Ovidian criticism from intertextuality to intersubjectivity, explores the relationship between self and other, and in particular that between male and female worlds, which is at the heart of Ovid's vision of poetry and the imagination. A series of close readings, focusing on both the more celebrated and less studied parts of the corpus, moves beyond the more often-asked questions of Ovid, such as whether he is 'for' or 'against' women, in order to explore how gendered subjects converse, compete and co-create. It illustrates how the tale of Medusa, alongside that of Narcissus, reverberates throughout Ovid's oeuvre, becoming a fundamental myth for his poetics. This book offers a compelling, often troubling portrait of Ovid that will appeal to classicists and all those interested in gender and difference.

Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Rome, La Sapieza. She has published Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002), Ovid's Lovers (2006) and Martial's Rome (2008), and has also contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (edited by Kirk Freudenberg, 2005) and Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (edited by Jason Konig and Tim Whitmarsh, 2007).

'The serious reader will profit from engaging with Rimell's central thesis and detailed examples. ... Her brief account of the characteristic moment of metamorphoses in Ovid's great compendium is well worth reading, and her discussion of the gorgon's gaze prompts new ideas about the relationship between Ovid's poetry and the visual arts.' Britannia