Ovid's Poetics of Illusion

Ovid’s poetry is haunted obsessively by a sense both of the living fullness of the texts and of the emptiness of these ‘insubstantial pageants’. This major study touches on the whole of Ovid’s output, from the Amores to the exile poetry, and is an overarching treatment of illusionism and the textual conjuring of presence in the corpus. Modern critical and theoretical approaches, accompanied by close readings of individual passages, examine the topic from the points of view of poetics and rhetoric, aesthetics, the psychology of desire, philosophy, religion and politics. There are also case studies of the reception of Ovid’s poetics of illusion in Renaissance and modern literature and art. The book will interest students and scholars of Latin and later European literatures. All foreign languages are accompanied by translations.

Ovid's poetry is haunted obsessively by a sense both of the living fullness of the texts and of the emptiness of these 'insubstantial pageants'. This major study touches on the whole of Ovid's output, from the Amores to the exile poetry, and is an overarching treatment of illusionism and the textual conjuring of presence in the corpus. Modern critical and theoretical approaches, accompanied by close readings of individual passages, examine the topic from the points of view of poetics and rhetoric, aesthetics, the psychology of desire, philosophy, religion and politics. There are also case studies of the reception of Ovid's poetics of illusion in Renaissance and modern literature and art. The book will interest students and scholars of Latin and later European literatures. All foreign languages are accompanied by translations.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Impossible objects of desire; 3. Death, desire and monuments; 4. The Heroides; 5. Narcissus: the mirror of the text; 6. Pygmalion: art and illusion; 7. Absent presences of language; 8. Conjugal conjurings; 9. The exile poetry; 10. Ovid recalled in the modern novel; Bibliography; Index of modern authors; Index of passages discussed; General index.

This major study provides a comprehensive treatment of the ways in which Ovid creates and simultaneously deflates various kinds of illusion in his poetry, touching on his entire output, from the Amores to the exile poetry. It includes substantial discussions of Ovid's reception in western literature and art.

Philip Hardie is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of New Hall. He has published Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986), The Epic Successors of Virgil (1993), an edition of Virgil's Aeneid Book IX in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series (1994) and the volume on Virgil in the Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics (1998). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002) and is currently contributing to the complete commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses to be published by the Fondazione Valla. He has also published numerous articles on Latin poetry and is working on a book on fama in Greek and Latin literature and the classical tradition. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series and a Fellow of the British Academy.