Metamorphosis and Dismemberment in the Myths of Actaeon and Pentheus in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (original) (raw)
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Metamorphosis and metamorphic identity: the myth of Actaeon in works of Ovid, Dante, and John Gower
Iris , 2009
To speak of metamorphosis in mythological terms is usually to refer to a feature of the mythic narrative in which a character undergoes a major, and usually irrevocable, change. 1 Yet myths are themselves, over time, subject to metamorphic processes and such changes are, likewise, major and irrevocable. The corpus of classical mythology has provided fertile ground for the imposition of a variety of interpretative and literary aims in the works of both classical and subsequent writers.
The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth
La mitología griega en la tradición literaria: de la Antigüedad a la Grecia contemporánea, 2017
Comparison of ancient accounts of the myth of Actaeon shows that, while the nature of his offense differs markedly between sources, the form of his death is stable throughout antiquity. This chapter uses observations from Nick Lowe and Ada Neschke-Hentschke about the paradigmatic functioning of myths to consider how the inevitability of Actaeon’s end could be harnessed to lend specific narrative colouring to retellings. It uses Ovid’s account of Actaeon in the Metamorphoses to examine the broader ancient tradition, arguing that the identification of Actaeon by name functioned in a meta-poetic manner to hasten his death, and that the inevitability of this death brought with it implicit consideration of the workings of justice in the mythic story-world.
The Decisive Moment in Mythology : The Instant of Metamorphosis
Time and Space in Ancient Myth, Religion and Culture, eds Anton Bierl, Menelaos Christopoulos, Athina Papachrysostomou, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2017
We analyze the process of metamorphosis in Greek 'mythographers' as the 'decisive moment' when a person is transformed. We begin with examples drawn from Antoninus Liberalis for showing the role of verbal aspect in the narrative, then some devices of metamorphosis, such as the wand and the touch by a god. Disappearing appears as a form of metamorphosis. The study of the 'instant before' shows the importance of pursuit and impossible flight. Incestuous loves appear in Antoninus Liberalis, but with more frequency in Parthenius of Nicaea, which allows to imagine that Freud could have found benefit studying these texts for his theory, especially with the narrative of Periandros' mother and the expression of pleasure felt by the son in the relation with his mother (he does not know then who she is). We analyze the kinship between metamorphosis and metaphor, important for poetry and visual arts. We conclude with the link between metamorphosis and the notion of rites of passage, and for love stories being told for the pleasure of both author and audience. Pursuit and impossible flight eventually appear as a means for the pursued girl of escaping and yielding, for the pursuer as a means of giving up sexual possession and keeping forever a substitute as the syrinx or the laurel. publ. in Time and Space in Ancient Myth, Religion and Culture, eds Anton Bierl, Menelaos Chrystopoulos, Athina Papachrysostomou, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 2017, coll. MythosEikonPoiesis 10, p. 335-353.
This paper deals with the poem Metamorphoses, published by C. H. Sisson in 1968 in the same-titled collection and directly inspired by Ovid’s major poem. C. H. Sisson’s poem shares many features with most of the rewritings of Ovid’s poem which were to appear during the «New Age of Ovid», which began in 1994 with the collection After Ovid. New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, and which is still ongoing – like the fragmentary and heterogeneous nature, the “defamiliarizing” approach (for which see S. Hinds, Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction, «Transactions of the American Philological Association» 135, 2005, 49-81), and the fusion of the classical paradigm with one or more other paradigms –, so that it could be seen as an anticipation of those works.
Mother, Mother! Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and Pietas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
CAMWS, 2018
In this paper I will look at occurrences of throat slitting in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and examine the connection of this act to human sacrifice and cannibalism throughout the work. I will focus especially on the relationship between throat slitting, human sacrifice, and pietas. In my examination of this relationship I will show that Ovid uses the motif of throat slitting and its inseparable implication of sacrifice to draw attention to his characters’ interaction with and, especially, violation of pietas. That Ovid employs such a visceral and impossible to ignore image as human sacrifice to mark violations of pietas speaks to the importance of this virtue within the work, and the central place of pietas in Ovid’s world.
Transforming the Genre, Apuleius' Metamorphoses, Ancient Narrative Suppl. 8
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