A01=Andrew M. Feldherr
Aeneid
Aetion
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Allusion
Ambiguity
Anachronism
Ancient Greek comedy
Anthropomorphism
Apotheosis
Arachne
Ars Amatoria
Artifice
Author_Andrew M. Feldherr
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
COP=United States
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Dichotomy
Dionysus
Enjambment
Epic poetry
Epigram
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Etiology
Evocation
Exemplum
Fasti
Fiction
Founding of Rome
Freedman
Genre
Greek mythology
Hellenistic period
Iconography
Imagery
Injunction
Irony
Language_English
Latin literature
Literature
Livy
Lucretius
Lycaon (Arcadia)
Metamorphoses
Muse
Mutability (poem)
N. (novella)
Narration
Narrative
Ovid
PA=Available
Palinurus
Parody
Pentheus
Philomela
Pity
Plautus
Poetry
Price_€50 to €100
Princeton University Press
Procession
Procne
Protagonist
PS=Active
Rhetoric
Simile
Skepticism
softlaunch
Spectacle
Subjectivity
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
Suspension of disbelief
The Various
Tragedy
Tristia
Turnus
Uncertainty
Verisimilitude (fiction)
Virgil
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691138145
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Sep 2010
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
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".
