Download or read book A Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Volume 1, General Introduction and Books 1-6 written by Alessandro Barchiesi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).