Repeat Performances: Ovidian Repetition and the Metamorphoses

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Although repetition is found in all ancient literary genres, it is especially pervasive in epic poetry. Ovid’s Metamorphoses exploits this dimension of the epic genre to such an extent that past critics have faulted it as too filled with recycled themes and language. This volume seeks a deeper understanding of Ovidian repetitiveness in the context of new scholarship on intertextuality and intratextuality, examining the urposeful reuse of previous material and the effects produced by a text’s repetitive gestures.

Uniting the essays is a shared vision of the possibilities of Latin epic poetry and a series of attempts to realize those possibilities. Some of the pieces fall into a traditional vein of allusion and intertextuality; others are more innovative in their approaches. Each, in a sense, stands as a placeholder for a methodology of theorizing the repetitive practices of poetry, of epic, and of Ovid in particular. All citations from Greek and Latin are translated into English, rendering the book accessible to scholars of literature beyond classical studies.