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Silenced Voices
The Poetics of Speech in Ovid
Bartolo A. Natoli
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
Laura McClure, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, and Matthew Roller, Series Editors
“Natoli’s monograph reminds us to read Ovid’s exile poetry with fresh appreciation for its literary complexity and learned allusiveness, and in that Ovid enthusiasts may be pleased.”
—Classical Journal
Silenced Voices is a pointed examination of the loss of speech, exile from community, and memory throughout the literary corpus of the Roman poet Ovid. In his book-length poem Metamorphoses, characters are transformed in ways that include losing their power of human speech. In Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, poems written after Ovid's exile from Rome in 8 ce, he represents himself as also having been transformed, losing his voice.
Bartolo A. Natoli provides a unique cross-reading of these works. He examines how the motifs and ideas articulated in the Metamorphoses provide the template for the poet's representation of his own exile. Ovid depicts his transformation with an eye toward memory, reformulating how his exile would be perceived by his audience. His exilic poems are an attempt to recover the voice he lost and to reconnect with the community of Rome.
Bartolo A. Natoli is an assistant professor of classics at Randolph-Macon College.
Praise
“A significant and distinctive contribution to Ovidian scholarship, tackling the issues of voice and silence in a comparative reading of Ovid's varied works.”
—Gianpiero Rosati, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
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Larger images
January 2021
LC: 2016049007 PA
248 pp. 6 x 9
2 b/w illustrations
2 tables
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