In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in
Ovid's "Meta-morphoses," Garth Tissol contends that stylistic
features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay,
narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the
poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style
that makes the process of reading the work a changing,
transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the
poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and
flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely
ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other
element of Ovid's art.
In the first chapter, Tissol argues that verbal wit and wordplay
are closely linked to Ovidian metamorphoses. Wit challenges the
ordinary conceptual categories of Ovid's readers, disturbing and
extending the meanings and references of words. Thereby it
contributes on the stylistic level to the readers' apprehension of
flux. On a larger scale, parallel disturbances occur in the
progress of narratives. In the second and third chapters, the
author examines surprise and abrupt alteration of perspective as
important features of narrative style. We experience reading as a
transformative process not only in the characteristic indirection
and unpredictability of Ovid's narrative but also in the memory of
his predecessors. In the fourth chapter, Tissol shows how Ovid
subsumes Vergil's "Aeneid" into the "Metamorphoses" in an
especially rich allusive exploitation, one which contrasts Vergil's
aetiological themes with those of his own work.
Originally published in 1996.
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