Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture
Regular price
€112.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Helena Taylor
Author_Helena Taylor
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBB
Category=DSBD
Category=NL-DS
COP=United Kingdom
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BB
HMM=241
IMPN=Oxford University Press
ISBN13=9780198796770
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20170515
POP=Oxford
Price=€50 to €100
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press
SMM=20
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
WG=462
WMM=160
Product details
- ISBN 9780198796770
- Weight: 462g
- Dimensions: 160 x 241 x 20mm
- Publication Date: 04 May 2017
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: Oxford, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Seventeenth-century France saw one of the most significant 'culture wars' Europe has ever known. Culminating in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, this was a confrontational, transitional time for the reception of the classics. Helena Taylor explores responses to the life of the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, within this charged atmosphere. To date, criticism has focused on the reception of Ovid's enormously influential work in this period, but little attention has been paid to Ovid's lives and their uses. Through close analysis of a diverse corpus, which includes prefatory Lives, novels, plays, biographical dictionaries, poetry, and memoirs, this study investigates how the figure of Ovid was used to debate literary taste and modernity and to reflect on translation practice. It shows how the narrative of Ovid's life was deployed to explore the politics and poetics of exile writing; and to question the relationship between fiction and history. In so doing, this book identifies two paradoxes: although an ancient poet, Ovid became key to the formulation of aspects of self-consciously 'modern' cultural movements; and while Ovid's work might have adorned the royal palaces of Versailles, the poetry he wrote after being exiled by the Emperor Augustus made him a figure through which to question the relationship between authority and narrative. The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture not only nuances understanding of both Ovid and life-writing in this period, but also offers a fresh perspective on classical reception: its paradoxes, uses, and quarrels.
Helena Taylor is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Exeter. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, where she then held a Queen's College Laming Junior Fellowship. Her research focuses on seventeenth-century French culture, with an interest in women's writing, early modern quarrels, and classical reception.
