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OVIDIAN TRANSFORMATIONS: ESSAYS ON OVID'S METAMORPHOSES AND ITS RECEPTION. Edited by PHILIP HARDIE, ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI, and STEPHEN HINDS. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society (Suppl. 23). 1999. Pp. 336.
THIS NEW COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON OVID'S METAMORPHOSES, with a number of papers by many of the most distinguished Ovidian scholars, offers many fresh insights on Ovid and serves to indicate some recent trends in criticism of the poem. As the editors inform us, the papers in this volume were first delivered at a conference entitled "Perspectives on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Modern Critical Approaches and Earlier Reception," held at Cambridge University in July 1997. The collection notably devotes a great deal of attention to the reception of the Metamorphoses, as its subtitles indicates, beginning with Ovid's own exile poetry (see Stephen Hinds's excellent contribution, "After Exile: Time and Teleology from Metamorphoses to Ibis," on Ovid as Ovid's first reader), with no fewer than eight of the eighteen papers devoted to this topic. The exploration of links between the Metamorphoses and Ovid's exile poetry is another emergent and important field of study represented here in a number of papers. The editors have provided the volume with an introduction which is one of the highlights of the book. An overriding theme in the collection is the interpretation of the poem as a cosmogonie work which presents a world view largely negative, a reading interestingly "validated" by many post-Ovidian reinterpretations of the poem. This is indeed a serious Ovid. Also stressed throughout the essays is the interconnection between the narrative discourses of power, identity, and cultural ideologies. Notably played down here are the topics...