The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Barbara Pavlock

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780299231408
• eBook ISBN: 9780299231439
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Barbara Pavlock unmasks major figures in Ovid's Metamorphoses as surrogates for his narrative persona, highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the Metamorphoses. Although Ovid ostensibly validates traditional customs and institutions, instability is in fact a defining feature of both the core epic values and his own poetics.
    The Image of the Poet explores issues central to Ovid's poetics—the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, the reliability of the narrative voice, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry. The work explores the constructed author and complements recent criticism focusing on the reader in the text.

2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Narcissus and Elegy
• 2 The Metamorphic Medea
• 3 Daedalus and the Labyrinth of the Metamorphoses
• 4 Orpheus and the Internal Narrator
• 5 Ulysses and the Arms of Achilles
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index