Ovid's Tragic Heroines

Ovid's Tragic Heroines
Author: Jessica A. Westerhold
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2023-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501770373

Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities. Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry. Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.

Tragedy in Ovid

Tragedy in Ovid
Author: Dan Curley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107244528

Ovid is today best known for his grand epic, Metamorphoses, and elegiac works like the Ars Amatoria and Heroides. Yet he also wrote a Medea, now unfortunately lost. This play kindled in him a lifelong interest in the genre of tragedy, which informed his later poetry and enabled him to continue his career as a tragedian – if only on the page instead of the stage. This book surveys tragic characters, motifs and modalities in the Heroides and the Metamorphoses. In writing love letters, Ovid's heroines and heroes display their suffering in an epistolary theater. In telling transformation stories, Ovid offers an exploded view of the traditional theater, although his characters never stray too far from their dramatic origins. Both works constitute an intratextual network of tragic stories that anticipate the theatrical excesses of Seneca and reflect the all-encompassing spirit of Roman imperium.

Wake, Siren

Wake, Siren
Author: Nina MacLaughlin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374721092

In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I’ll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

Tragedy in Ovid

Tragedy in Ovid
Author: Dan Curley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107009537

This comprehensive study establishes the importance of an unexpected genre, tragedy, in the career of the most mercurial Western poet.

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

The Ovidian Heroine as Author
Author: Laurel Fulkerson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2005-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139446223

Ovid's Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naive and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulate a fictional poetic, mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition.

Tahriib

Tahriib
Author: Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2017
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781780373980

Although Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf has lived in exile in the UK for 20 years, she is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali poets, as well as a powerful woman poet in a literary tradition still largely dominated by men. She is a master of the major Somali poetic forms, including the prestigious gabay, by which she presents compelling arguments with astonishing feats of alliteration. The key to her international popularity is in her spirit and message: her poems are classical in construction but they are unmistakeably contemporary, and they engage passionately with the themes of war and displacement which have touched the lives of an entire generation of Somalis. The mesmerising poems in this landmark collection are brought to life in English by award-winning Bloodaxe poet Clare Pollard. Somali-English dual language edition co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides"

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's
Author: Simona Martorana
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2024-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501777084

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. To confront these perspectives and overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" argues for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides. By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing on works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.

Simile and Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Simile and Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Author: Marie Louise von Glinski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2012-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521760968

The first monograph on Ovid's epic simile, offering fresh perspectives on central episodes of this important work.

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England
Author: Heather James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108809022

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late seventeenth century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. Moving beyond mere topicality, she identifies the ingenuity, novelty and audacity of the period's poetry as the political inverse of censorship culture. Considering Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Wharton among many others, the book explains how free speech was extended into the growing domain of English letters, and thereby presents a new model of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy.

Ovid's Women of the Year

Ovid's Women of the Year
Author: Angeline Chiu
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-08-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472130048

Ovid's "calendar girls" reveal what it means to be Roman