Browsing by Subject "Ovid"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Always look on the bright side of death: violence, death, and supernatural transformation in Ovid's Fasti(2015-02) Beek, Anna EverettOvid's Fasti, in its elaboration of mythic stories and the aetia of Roman religious practices, exhibits a marked correlation between violence and supernatural transformation: people who experience acts of intense violence such as rape, assault, and bodily mutilation are transformed by the experience into gods or other supernatural beings. In fact, within the Fasti, nearly all apotheoses have an episode of violence as a catalyst, and moreover nearly all violence results in transformation. Although rape (and some other forms of violence) in the Fasti has been examined extensively by other scholars, previous studies have focused on the perpetration of violence, while this dissertation examines the consequences of the event, how the victims fail to re-integrate to society and are removed by being ostracized, exiled, killed, transformed, or even apotheosed because a return to their former lives is impossible. Some of the prominent examples treated are Romulus, Anna Perenna, Ino, Callisto, and Lara. Special attention is paid to how this overarching pattern differentiates the Fasti from Ovid's best known collection of mythic transformation stories, the Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses does provide several episodes of apotheosis (such as those of Hercules, Aeneas, Romulus, and Julius Caesar), and those episodes share certain structural elements that recur in similar episodes in the Fasti: in many cases, the character in question is put in life-threatening danger, which is averted at the last minute by divine intervention and transformation into divinity. Nevertheless, the Fasti, unlike the Metamorphoses, has almost no episodes of humans being transformed into plants, birds, stones, or geographic features as salvation from a threat or punishment for transgression. On the contrary, transformation is almost exclusively a vehicle to divinity or catasterism. The Fasti's strong association of violence with apotheosis and vice versa enshrines violence within the Roman calendar and even celebrates it as a path to a greater destiny.Item The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England(2018-06) Olson, AsaIn early modern England, “elegy” did not simply denote funeral poetry, as it does today. Rather, it referred to the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. These classical Roman authors self-consciously defined their poems as nequitia, “worthless,” in contrast with epic’s thematic gravity. However, in early modern England, this ostensibly trifling genre exerted just as much influence as the epic. “The Form of Selfhood” argues that the composition of elegies, due to the genre’s central role in early modern education, structured the consciousness of young English writers. In Rome, elegists had challenged epic’s superiority by underscoring elegy’s interest in subjectivity, personal affairs, and erotic persuasion. Elegy’s appeal to young men’s psychological experiences, as well as its oratorical and epistolary premises, eventually made it a standard genre in early modern grammar schools. While works like Castiglione’s The Courtier emphasized rhetoric’s importance for self-presentation, elegies modelled ethopoeia or how to make a persona. Furthermore, Ovid’s elegies, which present him from his amorous youth to his tearful exile, demonstrated how poetry might enable the (typically male) student to craft the gendered, professional, and political terms of his own subjectivity. In early modern England, elegy was institutionalized as a form to constitute and interrogate the self. This project thus develops studies of the reception of classical texts while reexamining our perception of early modern England’s classical canon. Literary scholars have scrutinized how canon formation reflects social dominance of certain race, gender, and cultural identities. I examine how the age, gender, and educational experiences of young male readers shaped the canon of Greek and Roman classics in early modern England. Classical reception studies typically foreground Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) when charting classical influence in early modern England. Epic, especially, has been prioritized as a vehicle for early modern conceptions of nation and empire. However, the emphasis of epic and Virgilian influence on English writers like Shakespeare and Milton in their “mature” phases obscures their use of elegy in their youth. Moreover, it obscures what young readers, both then and now, typically enjoy in this poetry: its erotic-persuasive utility, irreverent humor, and dramatic nature. In their youth, authors such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton use elegy to fashion identities around conflicts in love, friendship, and civic responsibilities. Furthermore, these poems reveal early literary and professional ambitions by which we can reconceptualize each of these poets’ reputations. Shakespeare’s use of elegy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveals his skepticism of Ovid as a model of self-presentation during a time otherwise marked by his Ovidianism; Donne’s elegies interrogate ideas of a fragmented, contingent self through the concept of sincerity; and Milton’s elegies reveal his attempt to fashion himself as a grave poet and make sense of his own self-division.Item Maximae Furiarum: The Female Demonic in Augustan Epic(2016-05) Cullick, RachaelThis dissertation examines the development of the traditional Greek Furies into a new type of demonic figure that arises in Vergil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Along with the new emphasis on their independent agency, disguise, and feminine and monstrous physicality, one of the most important innovations in the Aeneid is that the Furies incite crimes by playing on human desires, even as their traditional power to enforce order by punishing crimes is expanded upon. At the heart of the Furies' structural and thematic importance in the Aeneid is their fundamental connection to inflaming passion, which is both necessary and dangerous, and to the authoritative punishment that is central to Roman social order. The associations with wrath and passions developed by Vergil are very much a part of the Furies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but they are also important within the broader context of ancient views of women, the supernatural, and how they intersect with provocation, punishment, and power. Overall, then, the traits of this new type of figure are very influential on imperial Latin epic and later images of the demonic in Western culture, particularly in their double edged power to arouse human passions and punish the resulting crimes.