Ovid

Francesca Martelli surveys the contours of current scholarship on Ovid. Her appraisal covers the post-structuralist recuperation of Ovid's poetry that began in the 80s, and looks toward the narratives that posthumanism and other new materialist discourses have yet to disclose.

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In this volume, Francesca Martelli outlines some of the main contours of recent, current and future research on Ovid. Her study looks back to the rehabilitation of Ovid's oeuvre in the 1980s, and considers the post-modern aesthetic prerogatives and post-structuralist theoretical concerns that drove the critical recuperation of his poetry throughout that decade and in the decades that followed. But it also looks forward, by considering how the themes of this poet's oeuvre answer to a variety of new materialist concerns that are now gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences. It highlights the ecopoetic sensibility of the Metamorphoses, for example, and unpacks the environmental narratives that this poem yields when read in dialogue with the discourses of critical posthumanism. And it closes by considering the hauntological aesthetics of Ovid's exile poetry as a comment on the effects of the principate on time, space, media, and art.