The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare

by Lynn Enterline

Overview

This persuasive book describes the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline analyzes what happens when Renaissance authors revisit Ovid's stories of violence and desire, paying close attention to the ways in which his subversive representations of gender, sexuality and the body influence later conceptions of the self and erotic life. This vividly original book makes a profound contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521624503
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2000
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture , #35
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. Pursuing Daphne; 2. Medusa's mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses; 3. Embodied voices: autobiography and fetishism in the Rime Sparse; 4. 'Be not obsceane though wanton': Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image; 5. 'Poor instruments' and unspeakable events in The Rape of Lucrece; 6. 'You speak a language that I understand not': the rhetoric of animation in The Winter's Tale; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Lynn Enterline's The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare is a subtle, sophisticated, and lucid essay on the Ovidian tradition. Particularly impressive is the clarity and magisterial logic with which she sets complex issues in relation to each other, through extraordinarily nuanced readings. No one has done a better job of mapping the intersection of Ovidianism and Petrarchanism and their bearing on Elizabethan literature." Leonard Barkan

"This is a theoretically yet compact book, one that should inspire those scholars interested in contemporary critical theory, especially feminism and psychoanalysis, as well as those who study the Renaissance imitation of the classics and those interested in the rhetoric of sex and desire." Renaissance and Reformation

"...Enterline grasps Ovid's art of poetic composition with new specificity and exactness." Choice

From the Publisher