The Face of Nature

Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Garth Tissol

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691600390, 9780691011028
• eBook ISBN: 9781400864614
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art.

In the first chapter, Tissol argues that verbal wit and wordplay are closely linked to Ovidian metamorphoses. Wit challenges the ordinary conceptual categories of Ovid's readers, disturbing and extending the meanings and references of words. Thereby it contributes on the stylistic level to the readers' apprehension of flux. On a larger scale, parallel disturbances occur in the progress of narratives. In the second and third chapters, the author examines surprise and abrupt alteration of perspective as important features of narrative style. We experience reading as a transformative process not only in the characteristic indirection and unpredictability of Ovid's narrative but also in the memory of his predecessors. In the fourth chapter, Tissol shows how Ovid subsumes Vergil's Aeneid into the Metamorphoses in an especially rich allusive exploitation, one which contrasts Vergil's aetiological themes with those of his own work.

Originally published in 1997.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Glittering Trifles: Verbal Wit and Physical Transformation
• 2. The Ass's Shadow: Narrative Disruption and Its Consequences
• 3. Disruptive Traditions
• 4. Deeper Causes: Aetiology and Style
• Conclusion
• Appendix A G.J. Vossius on Syllepsis Oratoria
• Appendix B Syllepsis and Zeugma
• Appendix C Further Examples of Syllepsis in Ovid
• References
• Index Locorum
• Index