Loving Writing/Ovid's Amores

A sustained exploration of the wicked charm of Ovid's perennially popular Amores, focusing on the characterization of the poet-lover (cocksure yet hapless) and his desire for the erotic agitation supplied by his uncooperative mistress and his demanding verse form. Scholarly yet accessible, so will also appeal to students and teachers.

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This book offers a fresh reading of the Amores centered on the aggressive, opportunistic, endlessly fluent, pleasure-seeking character, the poet-lover of the collection, here called Naso. Resisting the scholarly tendency to segregate the poet from the lover, Ellen Oliensis teases out the compromising affiliations between Naso's most 'poetic' performances and his seamy erotic adventures and shows that his need to write the script of his own subjection, far from delegitimizing his desire, tallies with other features of his generally masochistic profile. The book concludes with an exploration of the masochistic pleasures of the elegiac writing project as such, thereby effectively re-uniting Ovid with his surrogate within the collection.