This book is a study of Ovid and his poetry as a cultural phenomenon, conceived in the belief that such a study of tradition also casts fresh light on Ovid himself. Its main concern is with exploring the influence of Ovid on literature, especially English literature, but it also takes a wider perspective, including, for example, the visual arts. The book takes the form of a series of studies by specialists in their fields, including a number of scholars of international renown. The essays cover the period from the twelfth century, when there was an upsurge of interest in Ovid, through to the decline in his fortunes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are critical and comparative in approach and collectively give a detailed sense of Ovid's importance in Western culture. Topics covered include Ovid's influence on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Dryden, T. S. Eliot, the myths of Daedalus and Icarus and Pygmalion, and the influence of Ovid's poetry on art.

Roman and medieval poets and authors not only explored the physicality and sexuality of love, driven by passion and desire, but also saw love as a labour, a project to be worked on and achieved to reach the final goal.

Virgil, Horace and Ovid are often cited as the three great canonical poets of classical Roman literature. And of the three, arguably it is Ovid (43 BCE-CE 17/18) who has the most enduring legacy. Carole Newlands introduces her subject as an ancient author with a vital place in the modern cultural canon: and also as the inspiration behind figures as diverse as Chaucer, Titian, Dryden and Ted Hughes. She views Ovid as a Latin writer who is uniquely suitable for times of change: he appeals to postmodern sensibilities because of his interest in psychology, his fascination with cultural hybridity and his challenge to the conventional divide between animal and human. This book explores the connection between the historical poet and the works he produced: love elegies, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. It shows that unlike Virgil - who wrote early in Augustus' reign, anticipating a golden age of peace and prosperity - Ovid was a product of the late Augustan age: one of hardening autocracy and the greater influence of Tiberius behind the scenes. His elegies and erotic myths must therefore be understood as the result of complex, shifting political circumstances.

The first book of its kind, Marlowe's Ovid explores and analyzes in depth the relationship between the Elegies-Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores-and Marlowe's own dramatic and poetic works. Stapleton carefully considers Marlowe's Elegies in the context of his seven known dramatic works and his epyllion, Hero and Leander, and offers a different way to read Marlowe. Stapleton employs Marlowe's rendition of the Amores as a way to read his seven dramatic productions and his narrative poetry while engaging with previous scholarship devoted to the accuracy of the translation and to bibliographical issues. The author focuses on four main principles: the intertextual relationship of the Elegies to the rest of the author's canon; its reflection of the influence of Erasmian humanist pedagogy, imitatio and aemulatio; its status as the standard English Amores until the Glorious Revolution, part of the larger phenomenon of pan-European Renaissance Ovidianism; its participation in the genre of the sonnet sequence. He explores how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited Marlowe as a writer, a kind of literary archaeology that explains why he may have commenced such an undertaking. Marlowe's Ovid adds to the body of scholarly work in a number of subfields, including classical influences in English literature, translation, sexuality in literature, early modern poetry and drama, and Marlowe and his milieu.

Presents a selection of stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the most famous and influential collection of Greek and Roman myths in the world. It includes well-known stories like those of Daedalus and Icarus, Pygmalion, Narcissus and King Midas. The book is designed for those who have completed an introductory course in Latin and aims to help such users to enjoy the story-telling, character-drawing and language of one of the world's most delightful and influential poets. The text is accompanied by full vocabulary and grammar notes, with assistance based on two widely used beginners' courses, Reading Latin and Wheelock's Latin. Essays at the end of each passage point up important detail and show how the logic of each story unfolds, while study sections offer questions for discussion and ways of thinking further about the passage. No other intermediate text is so carefully designed to make reading Ovid a pleasure.

"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death, this is by definition a remarkably accurate prophecy. Ovid was not the only ancient author with aspirations to be read for eternity, but no poet of the Greco-Roman world has had a deeper or more lasting impact on subsequent literature and art than he can claim. In the present day no Greek or Roman poet is as accessible, to artists, writers, or the general reader: Ovid's voice remains a compellingly contemporary one, as modern as it seemed to his contemporaries in Augustan Rome. But Ovid was also a man of his time, his own story fatally entwined with that of the first emperor Augustus, and the poetry he wrote channels in its own way the cultural and political upheavals of the contemporary city, its public life, sexual mores, religion, and urban landscape, while also exploiting the superbly rich store of poetic convention that Greek literature and his Roman predecessors had bequeathed to him. This Very Short Introduction explains Ovid's background, social and literary, and introduces his poetry, on love, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile, a restlessly innovative oeuvre driven by the irrepressible ingenium or wit for which he was famous. Llewelyn Morgan also explores Ovid's immense influence on later literature and art, spanning from Shakespeare to Bernini. Throughout, Ovid's poetry is revealed as enduringly scintillating, his personal story compelling, and the issues his life and poetry raise of continuing relevance and interest. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Ideally suited to intermediate to advanced college-level students, The Student’s Ovid offers twenty-one selections from the Metamorphoses, with notes to aid translation and interpretation. The introduction includes an essay on Ovid’s life and works, an outline of the structure of the Metamorphoses, and tips on Latin poetic forms and usage. Accompanying each Latin passage is an introduction that provides background on the myths and their literary history, both in Ovid and in other classical authors. The detailed notes on each selection are designed to help students read and understand the Latin for themselves. Other special features of this book include: · a glossary of mythological characters · lists of stories grouped by theme to help teachers design courses to suit their students’ interests · discussions of the basic concepts of classical meter, Latin pronunciation, and accentuation · reference charts on the declension of Greek nouns to aid the reading of proper names · a select bibliography of translations and secondary studies