The ovidian heroine as author: reading, writing, and community in the "Heroides"
Editorial CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mainland Spain
- Publisher CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
- ISBN13 9780521846721
- ISBN10 0521846722
- Type Book
- Pages 187
- Published 2005
- Language English
- Bookbinding Rustic
Sections
Latin Literature (studies)The ovidian heroine as author: reading, writing, and community in the "Heroides"
Editorial CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mainland Spain
Book Details
Ovid's Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naïve and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulate a fictional poetic mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition.