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Norton ( E. ) Aspects of Ecphrastic Technique in Ovid's Metamorphoses . Pp. vi + 236. Newcastle Upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2013. Cased, £44.99, US$75.99. ISBN: 978-1-4438-4271-6 .
Reviews
The topic of ecphrasis has attracted much attention of late in classical studies, resulting in a rich and sophisticated, as well as imposing and unwieldy, body of scholarship. N.'s monograph makes at best a modest and oblique contribution to this challenging field. It should be noted at the outset that the title is likely to mislead potential readers. This is not really a book about ecphrasis as such, and most of the volume is not specifically concerned with Ovid's epic. The Metamorphoses do not become the object of N.'s analysis until the final two chapters, and only the first of these deals with ecphrasis proper. The lengthy preliminaries to the Ovidian material may reflect the origins of the monograph in a dissertation. At the same time, it should be noted that there is a decided shortage of ecphrasis in the Metamorphoses, at least as N. defines the term. In fact, her definition admits only three instances: the doors of the Palace of the Sun at 2.1-18; the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne at 6.53-128; and the crater of Anius at 13.685-701. While Ovidian scholars have frequently discussed these passages individually - the Arachne episode in particular has been a touchstone for metaliterary and metageneric analysis over the last several decades - N. is right to point out that comprehensive investigations of Ovidian ecphrasis are much rarer.
That said, there are, as we have already hinted, good grounds for not seeing this monograph as fully committed to the study of Ovidian ecphrasis. Doubts arise not just from the balance of chapter headings, but also from N.'s articulation of her critical agenda. In the introduction N. makes the programmatic observation that 'it is [the] emphasis on the...