Metamorphic Readings

Few works of Latin literature have been read as widely as Ovid's Metamorphoses, and few have shaped European writing and culture as deeply. The poem gathers an enormous store of myth and also handles storytelling with great skill, so readers from very different backgrounds and levels of schooling can find something in it. Because its preoccupation with change and with crossing boundaries speaks to present-day concerns, scholarship on it has grown in step.

This collection surveys current research on the poem as a canonical Roman epic. Its essays take varied approaches but are written in a clear, accessible style. They examine how transformation works and what happens when limits are broken. The contributors look at three areas: the transformations that shaped the myths before Ovid, the transformations at work inside the poem and what they reveal about metamorphosis, and the transformations the poem has undergone as later readers reinterpreted it. Among the forms of change explored is the way the poem itself alters the genre of mythic narrative.