Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination

Description

Ovid's Metamorphoses offers a compelling site for reconsidering the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. The poem's recurrent theme is the physical transformation of humans into other life forms, a theme that invites readers to consider how human and non-human agencies have evolved from and adapted to one another in a relationship characterized by fluctuating perceptions of friction and symbiosis, distance and proximity. This volume of essays traces the variety of ways in which the world of the Metamorphoses offers a set of structures for modelling the relationship between humans and other agencies within the biosphere in ways that answer to many of the precepts of contemporary eco-criticism. The contributors make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in this ancient text as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate in many ways. Their papers also scrutinize a number of critical moments in the history of the text's ecological reception (including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of important Medieval and Renaissance receptions of Ovid) in an attempt to recuperate the Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the history of environmental thought.

Francesca Martelli is Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Ovid's Revisions (2013) and Ovid (2020). Giulia Sissa is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Madre Materia (with S. Campese and P. Manuli, 1983), Greek Virginity (1989), The Daily Life of the Greek Gods (with Marcel Detienne, 2000), L'ame est un corps de femme (2000), Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World (2009) and Jealousy. A forbidden passion (2017).

Ovid's "environment" is a very obvious and at the same time an extremely complicated topic. "Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination" interrogates the Ovidian text with new questions, which encourage us to rethink the role of the non-human world in the Metamorphoses and beyond. -- Simona Martorana, Humboldt Research Fellow, Kiel University and University of Hamburg, Germany