Ovid

by Carole E. Newlands

Overview

Virgil, Horace and Ovid are often cited as the three great canonical poets of classical Roman literature. And of the three, arguably it is Ovid (43 BCE-CE 17/18) who has the most enduring legacy. Carole Newlands introduces her subject as an ancient author with a vital place in the modern cultural canon: and also as the inspiration behind figures as diverse as Chaucer, Titian, Dryden and Ted Hughes. She views Ovid as a Latin writer who is uniquely suitable for times of change: he appeals to postmodern sensibilities because of his interest in psychology, his fascination with cultural hybridity and his challenge to the conventional divide between animal and human. This book explores the connection between the historical poet and the works he produced: love elegies, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. It shows that unlike Virgil - who wrote early in Augustus' reign, anticipating a golden age of peace and prosperity - Ovid was a product of the late Augustan age: one of hardening autocracy and the greater influence of Tiberius behind the scenes. His elegies and erotic myths must therefore be understood as the result of complex, shifting political circumstances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857739841
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/02/2015
Series:	Understanding Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Carole E. Newlands is a professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley
Carole E. Newlands is professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Cornell University Press 1995); Statius' Siluae and the Poetics of Empire (Cambridge University Press 2001); and Statius Siluae Book 2 a Commentary (Cambridge University Press 2011). She is currently co-editor, with W. J. Dominik, of the forthcoming Brill Companion to Statius; and co-editor, with J. F. Miller, of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook to the Reception of Ovid.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Key Dates in Ovid's Career x

Abbreviations xi

I Ovid in the Third Millennium and the First 1

II Writing for an Age of Gold: The Love Elegist 23

III Women as Authors: Letter Writing and the Heroides 47

IV Writing for an Age of Iron: The Metamorphoses 71

V The Fasti: Poem of Roman Time 99

VI Exile and After 123

VII The Reception of Ovid 147

Notes 161

Select Bibliography 183

Index 187