Playing Gods

Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-691-13814-5
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 390 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 823 g

This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts. Andrew Feldherr argues that a key to the political as well as literary power of the Metamorphoses is the way it manipulates its readers' awareness that its stories cannot possibly be true. By continually juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, Ovid shows how a poem made up of fictions can and cannot acquire the authority and presence of other discursive forms. One important way that the poem does this is through narratives that create a "double vision" by casting characters as both mythical figures and enduring presences in the physical landscapes of its readers. This narrative device creates the kind of tensions between identification and distance that Augustan Romans would have felt when experiencing imperial spectacle and other contemporary cultural forms. Full of original interpretations, Playing Gods constructs a model for political readings of fiction that will be useful not only to classicists but to literary theorists and cultural historians in other fields.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Feldherr, Andrew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Lateinische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturkritik: Hermeneutik und Interpretation

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part One: Fiction and Empire 13

Chapter 1: Metamorphosis and Fiction 15

Io and Syrinx 15

Metamorphosis 26

Beyond Belief 46

Chapter 2: Wavering Identity 60

Imitations of Immortality 63

Reception and Social Identity 83

Upward Mobility? 106

Part Two: Spectacle 123

Chapter 3: Homo Spectator: Sacrifice and the Making of Man 125

Creations 125

Pythagoras 149

Chapter 4: Poets in the Arena 160

Chapter 5: Philomela Again? 199

Part Three: Ovid and the Visual Arts 241

Chapter 6: Faith in Images 243

Pygmalion 257

Domestic Goddesses 276

Chapter 7: "Songs the Greater Image" 293

Reconciling Niobe 295

Perseus: The Shadow 313

Conclusion 342

References 351

Index of Passages Cited 365

General Index 373

Über Autor(innen)

Feldherr, Andrew
Andrew Feldherr is professor of classics at Princeton University. He is the author of "Spectacle and Society in Livy's History" and the editor of "The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians".