Classical Studies / Literature & Criticism / Art
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Ovid
before Exile Ovid responds to the quashing of artistic freedom in late Augustan Rome Ovid's epic masterpiece, the Metamorphoses,
with its fiercely irreverent tone and its resolute defiance of
the boundaries of genre, stands boldly apart both from the other
poetry of its age and from the epic tradition that preceded it.
A generation earlier, a high culture of poets and patrons had
flourished, giving rise to the great works of Vergil, Horace,
Propertius, and Tibullus. But, in this compelling new reading
of the Metamorphoses in its social and political context,
Patricia Johnson demonstrates that Ovid was writing in an artistic
atmosphere succumbing to a stranglehold of implicit censorship
that culminated in his exile from Rome in 8 A.D. "A new and stimulating reading of three central episodes of Ovid's brilliant Metamorphoses: the artistic contests between the Muses and their challengers, and Minerva and her challenger Arachne, and the more extended tale of Orpheus singing his lays of boy-love and forbidden female passions. All three narratives are set in the full dimensions of Ovid's own literary and political context."–Elaine Fantham, Princeton University "Johnson shows that the foreboding about artistic freedom of expression that pervades Ovid's exile poetry had set in even when he was writing the Metamorphoses."–Martin Helzle, Case Western Reserve University Patricia Johnson is associate professor of classical studies at Boston University. For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu Related interest |
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