Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid by Alison, Jane. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780199941650.

Ovids stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovids dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the Metamorphoses are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self, and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts? In Change Me, Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of The Love-Artist, renders substantial portions of Ovids great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovids Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alisons Ovid comes alive; the Roman poets great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alisons guiding principle and Muse. Change Me will transform forever readers experience of this most ingenious of poets. FEATURES The thematically organized translations are lucid, apt, precise, and playful Elaine Fanthams Foreword places Ovid in his Augustan context Alison Keiths introduction offers an overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world Incorporates sixteen color plates from classical antiquity that illustrate Ovidian themes Audio recordings (read by Alison) of sixteen selected passages are available at www.oup.com/us/alison