Ovidian Bibliofictions And The Tudor Book

Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and Metamorphoses. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid’s poetry stimulated the vernacular imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid’s English protégés replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet’s distinctive and frequently remarked ’bookishness’ in their own adaptations of his works. Focusing on the postclassical discourses that Ovid’s poetry stimulated, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book engages with vibrant current debates about the book as material object as it explores the Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies that informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books. Further, author Lindsay Ann Reid’s discussions of Ovidianism provide alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception, adaptation, and imitatio. While there is a sizeable body of published work on Ovid and Chaucer as well as on the ubiquitous Ovidianism of the 1590s, there has been comparatively little scholarship on Ovid’s reception between these two eras. Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book begins to fill this gap between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare by dedicating attention to the literature of the early Tudor era. In so doing, this book also contributes to current discussions surrounding medieval/Renaissance periodization.

Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and Metamorphoses. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid’s poetry stimulated the vernacular imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid’s English protégés replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet’s distinctive and frequently remarked ’bookishness’ in their own adaptations of his works. Focusing on the postclassical discourses that Ovid’s poetry stimulated, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book engages with vibrant current debates about the book as material object as it explores the Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies that informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books. Further, author Lindsay Ann Reid’s discussions of Ovidianism provide alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception, adaptation, and imitatio. While there is a sizeable body of published work on Ovid and Chaucer as well as on the ubiquitous Ovidianism of the 1590s, there has been comparatively little scholarship on Ovid’s reception between these two eras. Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book begins to fill this gap between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare by dedicating attention to the literature of the early Tudor era. In so doing, this book also contributes to current discussions surrounding medieval/Renaissance periodization.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Paeg -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Preface -- Notes on contributors -- Introduction: music for the dead and the living -- PART I: Going home -- 1 Into the profound deep: pulled by a song -- 2 'Farewell vain world, I'm going home': negotiating death in the sacred harp tradition -- 3 Crossing over, returning home: expressions of death as a place in George Crumb's River of Life -- PART II: 'Lest we forget': music, history and myth -- 4 Public mourning, the nation and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings -- 5 Swinging in heaven, boppin' in hell: jazz and death -- 6 'Sad and solemn requiems': disaster songs and complicated grief in the aftermath of Nova Scotia mining disasters -- PART III: approaching by turning away : metaphorical death -- 7 Moving between worlds: death, the otherworld and traditional Irish song -- 8 Dying for love in trouvère song -- PART IV: The restless dead -- 9 To the tune of 'Queen Dido': the spectropoetics of early modern English balladry -- 10 'Break on through to the other side': songs of death in supernatural horror films -- 11 'And the stars spell out your name': the funeral music of Diana, Princess of Wales -- 12 Barthes's orphic quest: music and mourning in Camera Lucida -- Index

A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.

This book offers an analysis of paratextual infrastructures in editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and shows how paratexts functioned as important instruments for publishers and commentators to influence readers of this ancient text.

"How were books in early modern England made, circulated, sold, stored, read, marked, altered, preserved, and destroyed? The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a stimulating account of the very newest work in the field, and an exploration of how new thinking might develop. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume combines lucidity, scholarly expertise, intellectual precision, and an imaginative structure that will enable contributors to show why the history of the book matters. This volume analyses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, and also considers critically how we can talk about the history of book"--

This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?

This volume shows the pervasiveness over a millennium and a half of the little-studied phenomenon of multi-tier intertextuality, whether as ‘linear’ window reference – where author C simultaneously imitates or alludes to a text by author A and its imitation by author B – or as multi-directional imitative clusters. It begins with essays on classical literature from Homer to the high Roman empire, where the feature first becomes prominent; then comes late antiquity, a lively area of research at present; and, after a series of essays on European neo-Latin literature from Petrarch to 1600, another area where developments are moving rapidly, the volume concludes with early modern vernacular literatures (Italian, French, Portuguese and English). Most papers concern verse, but prose is not ignored. The introduction to the volume discusses the relevant methodological issues. An Afterword outlines the critical history of ‘window reference’ and includes a short essay by Professor Richard Thomas, of Harvard University, who coined the term in the 1980s.