Teaching Delivery: This module is taught in 10 weekly lectures. 

Content: This module will examine the poetry of Ovid, probably the most influential of all Roman poets on later art and literature. It will focus on his great narrative poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses, examining, amongst other episodes, the famous stories of Narcissus, Daphne, Philomela, Pygmalion and Arachne. It will also look at select passages from his other works: his love poems, the Amores; his versified instruction on pulling the opposite sex, the Ars Amatoria; his letter-poems written in the voices of famous mythic women, the Heroides; and his lesser known but equally fascinating works like the Fasti (a didactic poem on the Roman calendar) and the Tristia (exile poetry).  Alongside study of passages in the original Latin the course will place his poetry in its social, historical, and literary context, while also considering its influence in later periods and its relevance to modern day concerns. Topics addressed include genre, narrative, style, allusion, humour, sexuality and gender, violence and aesthetics, Ovid's attitude towards Augustus, and the post-classical reception of Ovid's poetry in art and literature. 

Skills: By the end of the course, students will be expected to have acquired: (1) a general overview of the style and content of Ovid’s oeuvre in its historical context, 2) a detailed appreciation of the Metamorphoses both in the original Latin and in translation and an ability to analyse it from the perspective of language, genre(s), politics, poetic and philosophical influences, narrative technique, themes and poetics; 3) an awareness of different methodological and theoretical approaches to interpreting Ovid’s poetry, an ability to implement those approaches in practice, and to analyze different interpretations critically; (4) an appreciation of the post-classical influence and reception of Ovid’s poetry in a range of historical and cultural contexts.

Module text: 

Suggested preliminary reading: Try to read the complete works of Ovid in translation (the Penguin or World Classics editions are good).

Secondary reading: B. W. Boyd, ed. Brill’s Companion to Ovid; P. Hardie ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002); N. Holzberg, Ovid. The Poet and His Work. Translated by G.M. Gosharian (2002).