The Face of Nature
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: August 21, 1991
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9780691011028
Subjects: Poetry & poets: classical, early & medieval; Metamorphoses; History and criticism; Early Literature - History And Criticism; Greco-Roman Mythology; Ovid,; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Latin; Literature: Folklore/Mythology; Latin wit and humor; Ancient - Greece; Roman Literature; Classics; Comparative Literature; History / Ancient / Greece; Literary style; New Age / Meditation; Ovid; Cosmology, Ancient, in literature; Mythology, Classical, in literature; General; 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D
First sentence: In the Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden offers a hostile yet perceptive criticism of Ovid.
Description: In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as worldplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux.

Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art.