The Metamorphosis of Persephone

Ovid, a poet unashamedly in love in poetry, including his own, has enjoyed a recent renaissance in popularity. Yet there is still a certain tendency amongst critics to withhold from his writing the close, word-by-word, engagement which is its due. The primary aim of The Metamorphosis of Persephone is to celebrate this poet’s detailed verbal art. Ovid twice treated the myth of Persephone. Dr Hinds’ work is a close reading of the account in Metamorphoses 5. The book is at once a literary historical enquiry into the double transformation of the rape of Persephone, and a critical exploration of the self-conscious delight in language and in writing manifested in and between these twin Ovidian narratives. This attractively written and subtly nuanced literary study, which offers many quiet challenges to established modes of reading Latin narrative poetry, will be of interest both to scholars of Latin and to students of narrative in other languages.

Acknowledgements; Preface; Part I. Two Settings for a Rape: 1. Metamorphoses 5.256–64: the Heliconian fount; 2. Metamorphoses 5.385–91: the landscape of Enna; Part II. Ovid’s Two Persephones: 3. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Fasti 4; 4. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Metamorphoses 5; 5. Elegy and epic: a traditional approach; 6. Elegy and epic: a new approach; Epilogue; Notes; Works cited; Index of passages discussed; Index of subjects.