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Abstract
[...]in the world of Le Guin's pre-Hellenized Italian religion, a firebreathing monster slain by Hercules becomes euhemerized as a grubby local chieftain, and no spectacular underworld serpent winds its way between Queen Amata's breasts. [...]while Le Guin does offer us several self-reflexive meditations on reading, writing, poetry, and poetics, the details of Lavinia's waking life demonstrate the author's considerable interest in the Aeneid for its content, or the moral and political problems and questions it raises, among others. Poems like "Ariadne Dreams" (Going Out With PeacocL·), 'The Crown of Laurel" (Buffalo Gals), and "Danae 46" (Hard Words) all derive from classical mythology, and "Ariadne Dreams" I find particularly noteworthy here, since its speaker appears to anticipate several of Lavinia's meta-fictional quandaries: "The beat of sleep is all my mind. / I am my rhyme" (1-2). [...]the poem contains what I understand to be a reference to a future woman looking back upon the speaker: "What woman weeps / on the far seacoast of my sleep?" (15-6). [...]Cadden traces the "dialogism" of Le Guin's earlier works in a study strongly informed by Bakhtinian analysis; whether we ultimately agree more with Bloom or with Cadden- or decide that they don't really disagree themselves- Le Guin's propensity for the dialogic persists in Lavinia. [...]we needn't necessarily invoke Bahktinian heteroglossia to open ourselves to the possibility of more than two voices in either Lavinia or the Aeneid: see, for example, Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid. 25 See especially the distinction Le Guin makes between Boob "crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him" and "Baby Oo Oo" in her sling (166).