Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination

Giulia Sissa, Francesca Martelli, Giulia Sissa, Francesca Martelli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350268944
• eBook ISBN: 9781350268968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book positions Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought. The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid's poem as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem's ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Whoa! (a poem by John Shoptaw)
• Anthropology/Tragedy/Dark Ecology
• 1 Cuncta Fluunt: The Fluidity of Life in Ovid’s Metamorphic World
• 2 Ovid’s Gaia: Medea, the Middle and the Muddle in the Metamorphoses
• Cross-Species Encounters
• 3 Animal Listening
• 4 Multispecies Temporalities and Roman Fasti in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
• 5 Are Trees Really Like People?
• Science/Wisdom Traditions
• 6 The World in an Egg: Reading Medieval Ecologies
• 7 The Titania Translation: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Two Metamorphoses
• 8 Metamorphosis in a Deeper World
• Agriculture
• 9 Language, Life and Metamorphosis in Ovid’s Roman Backstory
• 10 ‘Who Can Impress the Forest?’ Agriculture, Warfare and Theatrical Experience in Ovid and Shakespeare
• Epilogue: A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright