Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities. Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry. Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.

Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities. Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry. Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.

This comprehensive study establishes the importance of an unexpected genre, tragedy, in the career of the most mercurial Western poet.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. To confront these perspectives and overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" argues for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides. By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing on works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.

Ovid's Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naive and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulate a fictional poetic, mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition.

The first monograph on Ovid's epic simile, offering fresh perspectives on central episodes of this important work.

Ovid's "calendar girls" reveal what it means to be Roman