The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (Princeton Legacy Library): 367 - Softcover

Tissol, Garth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691600392 ISBN 13: 9780691600390

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art. In the first chapter, Tissol argues that verbal wit and wordplay are closely linked to Ovidian metamorphoses. Wit challenges the ordinary conceptual categories of Ovid's readers, disturbing and extending the meanings and references of words. Thereby it contributes on the stylistic level to the readers' apprehension of flux. On a larger scale, parallel disturbances occur in the progress of narratives. In the second and third chapters, the author examines surprise and abrupt alteration of perspective as important features of narrative style. We experience reading as a transformative process not only in the characteristic indirection and unpredictability of Ovid's narrative but also in the memory of his predecessors. In the fourth chapter, Tissol shows how Ovid subsumes Vergil's Aeneid into the Metamorphoses in an especially rich allusive exploitation, one which contrasts Vergil's aetiological themes with those of his own work. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the

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From the Back Cover

"This book makes the first sustained argument (and a convincing one at that) for thematic significance of the poem's characteristic stylistic and narrative features. There are many excellent analyses of the designed instability of Ovid's text in general and Ovid's narrative indirection and downright deception in particular. I know of nothing comparable on this poem."--John F. Miller, University of Virginia

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691600392
• ISBN 13: 9780691600390
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252