Jo-Marie Claassen, Ovid Revisited. The Poet in Exile, London, Duckworth, nov. 2008, 288p.
- ISBN 9780715637838
- £25.00 (pb).
Recension par Rita Degl'Innocenti Pierini (Università di Firenze) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.01.10.
Présentation de l'éditeur:
Intime for the bimillennium of Ovid's relegation to Tomis on the BlackSea by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Jo-Marie Claassen here revises andintegrates into a more popular format two decades of scholarship onOvid's exile. Some twenty articles and reviews from scholarly journalshave been shortened, rearranged and merged into seven chapters, which,together with some new material, offer a wide-ranging overview of theexiled poet and his works. Ovid Revisited treats the poemsfrom exile as the literary culmination of Ovid's oeuvre, ascribing thepoet's resilience in the face of extreme hardship to the relief thathis poetry afforded him.
An introductionconsiders the phenomenon of Ovid's continued popularity, explains theimportance of chronology in reading the exilic poems and gives a briefsummary of the contents of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.The rest of the book ranges from consideration of Ovid's relationshipwith the emperor and with his own poetry, to his ubiquitous humour, tohis skill in metrics, vocabulary and verbal play, and to his use ofmythological figures from earlier parts of his oeuvre. The degree towhich Ovid universalised the sufferings of the dispossessed is assessedin a chapter comparing his exilic works with modern exilic literature.An excursus considers various directions in Ovidian studies today.
Jo-Marie Claassen was Associate Professor in the Department of AncientStudies at Stellenbosch University until she retired in 2001. She is aleading scholar on Ovid in exile and the author, inter alia, of Displaced Persons: the literature of exile from Cicero to Boethius (Duckworth, 1999) and of many academic articles.