Ovid S Metamorphoses And The Environmental Imagination

This book positions Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought. The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid's poem as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem's ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.

Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses presents a wide variety of brilliant episodes, from the rhetorically charged contest between Ulysses and Ajax over the arms of Achilles, to the tragic tale of Hecuba and her gruesome revenge, to the amusing story of Polyphemus' unrequited love for Galatea and its bloody conclusion. This edition discusses in detail Ovid's treatment of his sources and sets out the ways in which he has adapted earlier literature as material for his novel work. Guidance is offered on points of language and style, and the Introduction treats in general terms the themes of metamorphosis and the structure of the poem as a whole.

The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem comprised of over 250 myths. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. The Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works in Western culture, it has inspired such authors as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare. Numerous episodes from the poem have been depicted in acclaimed works of sculpture, painting, and music.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1828 Edition.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, inspiring artists and writers from Titian to Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as you've never read them before—sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious—from the fall of Troy to birth of the minotaur, and many others that only appear in the Metamorphoses. Connected together by the immutable laws of change and metamorphosis, the myths tell the story of the world from its creation up to the transformation of Julius Caesar from man into god. In the ten-beat, unrhymed lines of this now-legendary and widely praised translation, Rolfe Humphries captures the spirit of Ovid's swift and conversational language, bringing the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet to modern readers. This special annotated edition includes new, comprehensive commentary and notes by Joseph D. Reed, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Through National Book Award-winning translator Allen Mandelbaum's poetic artistry, this gloriously entertaining achievement of literature — classical myths filtered through the worldly and far from reverent sensibility of the Roman poet Ovid — is revealed anew.Savage and sophisticated, mischievious and majestic, witty and wicked, The Metamorphoses weaves together every major mythological story to display a dazzling array of miraculous changes, from the time chaos is transformed into order at the moment of creation, to the time when the soul of Julius Caeser is turned into a star and set in the heavens. In its earthiness, its psychological acuity, this classic work continues to speak over the centuries to our time. "Reading Mandelbaum's extraordinary translation, one imagines Ovid in his darkest moods with the heart of Baudelaire...Brilliant."—Booklist

This volume presents the Latin text, with an Introduction and full commentary, of Book XIII of the Roman poet Ovid's long work Metamorphoses. It discusses in detail Ovid's treatment of his sources and sets out the ways in which he adapted earlier literature as material for his novel enterprise. Guidance is offered on points of language and style, and the Introduction treats in general terms the themes of metamorphosis and the structure of the poem as a whole.

This landmark translation of Ovid was acclaimed by Ezra Pound as "the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)". Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends in which men and women are transformed -- often by love -- into flowers, trees, stones, and stars. Golding's robustly vernacular version was the first major English translation and decisively influenced Shakespeare, Spenser, and the character of English Renaissance writing.