Metamorphic Readings: Transformation, Language, and Gender in the Interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many ways with contemporary culture and society, modern research perspectives have developed correspondingly. Metamorphic Readings presents the state of the art in research on this canonical Roman epic. Written in an accessible style, the essays included represent a variety of approaches, exploring the effects of transformation and the transgression of borders. The contributors investigate three main themes: transformations into the Metamorphoses (how the mythic narratives evolved), transformations in the Metamorphoses (what new understandings of the dynamics of metamorphosis might be achieved), and transformations of the Metamorphoses (how the Metamorphoses were later understood and came to acquire new meanings). The many forms of transformation exhibited by Ovid's masterpiece are explored--including the transformation of the genre of mythic narrative itself.

Alison Sharrock, Professor of Classics, University of Manchester, Daniel Möller, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, Lund University, and Mats Malm, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Gothenburg

Alison Sharrock is Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester, where she has taught classical languages and literatures since 2000. She is currently Head of the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology, and Egyptology. Her publications include Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2 (OUP, 1994), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (co-edited with Helen Morales; OUP, 2000), The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (co-edited with Roy Gibson and Steven Green; OUP, 2007), and Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (co-edited with Daryn Lehoux and A. D. Morrison; OUP, 2013).

Daniel Möller is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Lund University. His main publications in Swedish and English range from Early Modern Swedish poetry and its relation to Early Modern European and Latin poetry to Swedish funerary Baroque poetry for animals. He has also published a monograph on the poetics of role-playing poetry and experimental occasional verse in the 18th century. In 2016, he co-edited an anthology on Swedish poetry, embracing a vast selection from the very origins to the modern poetry of today.

Mats Malm is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg. Malm has published monographs on Early Modern Scandinavian historiography, the first Swedish novels, on Swedish Baroque and on the voice in poetry. His monographs in English treat the Swedish Baroque from the perspective of history of literature, ideas and media, and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics, following redefinitions of the soul of poetry up to Romanticism.