Milton And Ovid

Contributing to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions, this book examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works.

Milton's Ovidian Eve presents a fresh and thorough exploration of the classical allusions central to understanding Paradise Lost and to understanding Eve, one of Milton's most complex characters. Mandy Green demonstrates how Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes, and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses to create a subtle and evolving portrait of Eve. Each chapter examines a different aspect of Eve's mythological figurations. Green traces Eve's development through multiple critical lenses, influenced by theological, ecocritical, and feminist readings. Her analysis is gracefully situated between existing Milton scholarship and close textual readings, and is supported by learned references to seventeenth-century writing about women, the allegorical tradition of Ovidian commentary, hexameral literature, theological contexts and biblical iconography. This detailed scholarly treatment of Eve simultaneously illuminates our understanding of the character, establishes Milton's reading of Ovid as central to his poetic success, and provides a candid synthesis and reconciliation of earlier interpretations.

Milton's Ovidian Eve presents a fresh and thorough exploration of the classical allusions central to understanding Paradise Lost and to understanding Eve, one of Milton's most complex characters. Mandy Green demonstrates how Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes, and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses to create a subtle and evolving portrait of Eve. Each chapter examines a different aspect of Eve's mythological figurations. Green traces Eve's development through multiple critical lenses, influenced by theological, ecocritical, and feminist readings. Her analysis is gracefully situated between existing Milton scholarship and close textual readings, and is supported by learned references to seventeenth-century writing about women, the allegorical tradition of Ovidian commentary, hexameral literature, theological contexts and biblical iconography. This detailed scholarly treatment of Eve simultaneously illuminates our understanding of the character, establishes Milton's reading of Ovid as central to his poetic success, and provides a candid synthesis and reconciliation of earlier interpretations.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.