Literature and Identity in The Golden Ass of
Apuleius is the first English translation of a work published
in 2007 as Le Metamorfosi di Apuleio: Letteratura e
identità, by Luca Graverini. The ...second-century CE novel
The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses, has proven to
be both captivating and highly entertaining to the modern reader,
but the text also presents the critic with a vast array of
interpretive possibilities. In fact, there is little consensus
among scholars on the fundamental significance of Apuleius' novel:
is it simply a form of narrative entertainment , or does it
represent some sort of religious or philosophical propaganda? Can
it be interpreted as a satire of fatuous belief in otherworldly
powers, or is it an utterly aporetic text? Graverini begins by
setting The Golden Ass in its ancient literary
context. Apuleius' playful defiance of generic conventions
represents a substantial literary innovation, but he is also taking
part in a tradition of narrative and satirical literature that
typically featured experimentation with genre. The interplay of
generic elements found in The Golden Ass reflects the
complexity of the author's cultural identity: Apuleius was a Roman
North African who had traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean
and enjoyed an extensive education in both Greek and Latin.
Graverini concludes with a study of the complex interaction of
these three dimensions of Apuleius' identity (African, Roman, and
Greek), and investigates what the narrative can tell us about the
culture of its readership. These cultural interactions affirm that
The Golden Ass aims to delight its readers as well as to
exhort them to religion and philosophy. Ben Lee's superb new
translation will make Graverini's groundbreaking study available to
a much wider scholarly readership.
This book aims to show the metamorphic nature of Ovid's reception in twentieth-century Italian literature. It is a study of the aesthetic effects of Ovid's poetics within both the novel and poetry ...tradition in Italy. By using a historical and philological methodology, the authors of each essay have shown the hermeneutic power of Ovid, read as a constant intertextual presence. From Giovanni Pascoli to Eugenio Montale, from Italo Calvino to Antonio Tabucchi, in this book Ovid's reception is finally shown to be as important as Virgil's and offers new important tools in order to understand the role of Latin literature in the twentieth century.
This article explores the representation and thematic importance of time within Ovid’s account of Narcissus. It argues that perceiving Narcissus for the characters within Ovid’s narrative provokes a ...recognition of the experience of time that becomes central to both the tragic and erotic aspects of his story. In presenting Narcissus as both the subject of a diachronic narrative and a static image, Ovid at once uses the medium of his representation to illustrate his theme and makes his poem a mirror in which his own audience can apprehend the mutability of time.
The challenges of editing a translation, such as the one preserved in the manuscript with Ovid’s Metamorphoses by dr. Joža Lovrenčič, include deciding about the art that accompanies the text. One of ...the options are the copper engravings from the workshop of Johann Weichard Valvasor; however, they omit some of the central stories. A more complete series of 178 illustrations was created by Bernard Salomon. Among its many versions, the one published by the German woodcutter Virgil Solis stands out due to its quality. Lovrenčič himself came from the Slovenian Littoral and perhaps he would delight in the fact that the single copy in Slovenian libraries is preserved in Piran.
This essay examines the way that plague discourse allows two writers, Ovid and Mary Shelley, to contemplate the power of a revolution to transform a civic body. The author focuses initially on Ovid’s ...rendering of plague on Aegina in Metamorphoses 7, contextualizing it as a response to the changing significance of pietas as well as to the succession crisis faced by the Principate in the 20’s BCE; she interprets King Aeacus’ narrative of the tragedy he witnesses among his people and their replacement by Myrmidons (ant-people) as a cynical response to the Augustan revolution and its ability to implement lasting change in how Roman subjects interact after the prolonged civil wars of the late Roman Republic. The author then turns to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in which a plague eradicates all of known humanity except for a single survivor and eye-witness, Lionel Verney. The essay demonstrates that Shelley taps into Ovid’s cynicism regarding the potential for human recovery after widespread devastation as she and her protagonist consider various alternatives for effective governance in England. Shelley’s exploration of the affective bonds born from familial ties (Ovidian pietas) suggest that such ties pose insurmountable problems to implementing permanent transformation within any human social order.
Ovids Erzählung von Philemon und Baucis steht exemplarisch für die Strategie des Dichters, aus heterogenen Quellen ein neues narratives Ganzes zu formen. Das wird in diesem Beitrag mit Blick auf die ...zeitgenössische soziale Realität, auf die Frage nach Intertextualität (im Rahmen eines weitgespannten Literaturkanons) und Fiktionalität sowie auf die Religionsgeschichte untersucht. Am Ende steht eine ebenfalls paradigmatische Betrachtung der Wege der Rezeption, die Ovids Metamorphosen genommen haben und die die Ovids Polyphonie reduzieren und vereindeutigen.
Based for the most part on Ovid'sMetamorphoses, epyllia retell stories of the dalliances of gods and mortals, most often concerning the transformation of beautiful youths. This short-lived genre ...flourished and died in England in the 1590s. It was produced mainly by and for the young men of the Inns of Court, where the ambitious came to study law and to sample the pleasures London had to offer. Jim Ellis provides detailed readings of fifteen examples of the epyllion, considering the poems in their cultural milieu and arguing that these myths of the transformations of young men are at the same time stories of sexual, social, and political metamorphoses.
Examining both the most famous (Shakespeare'sVenus and Adonisand Marlowe'sHero and Leander) and some of the more obscure examples of the genre (Hiren, the Fair GreekandThe Metamorphosis of Tabacco), Ellis moves from considering fantasies of selfhood, through erotic relations with others, to literary affiliation, political relations, and finally to international issues such as exploration, settlement, and trade. Offering a revisionist account of the genre of the epyllion, Ellis transforms theories of sexuality, literature, and politics of the Elizabethan age, making an erudite and intriguing contribution to the field.
Apuleius’ literary and philosophical fortune has been considerable since antiquity, mostly through the reception of The Golden Ass. The aim of this collection of essays is to highlight a few major ...aspects of this afterlife, from the High Middle Ages to early Romanticism, in the fields of literature, linguistics and philology, within a wide geographical scope. The volume gathers the proceedings of an international conference held in March 2016 at the Warburg Institute in London, in association with the Institute of Classical Studies. It includes both diachronic overviews and specific case-studies. A first series of papers focuses on The Golden Ass and its historical and geographical diffusion, from High Medieval Europe to early modern Mexico. The oriental connections of the book are also taken into account. The second part of the book examines the textual and visual destiny of Psyche’s story from the Apuleian fabula to allegorical retellings, in poetical or philosophical books and on stage. As the third series of essays indicates, the fortunes of the book led many ancient and early modern writers and translators to use it as a canonical model for reflections about the status of fiction. It also became, mostly around the beginning of the fifteenth century, a major linguistic and stylistic reference for lexicographers and neo-Latin writers : the last papers of the book deal with Renaissance polemics about ‘Apuleianism’ and the role of editors and commentators.
Esta contribución tiene como objetivo fundamental presentar tres manuscritos iluminados de las Metamorfosis de Ovidio, dos conservados en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) y uno en Dresde, en ...Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB). Las iluminaciones de los tres códices presentan una falta de correspondencia aparente con el contenido mitológico del texto y hasta la fecha no se han tenido en cuenta en los estudios sobre las Metamorfosis iluminadas. Su análisis permite poner en relación entre sí de manera clara los tres manuscritos, así como profundizar en el panorama de la miniatura del poema ovidiano durante los últimos siglos de la Edad Media.
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