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Edited by G. H. Hallam. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1882 edition by Macmillan and Co., London. ... Read more

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In the Heroides the Roman poet Ovid wittily plucks fifteen abandoned heroines from ancient myth and literature and creates the fiction that each woman writes a letter to the hero who left her behind. But in giving voice to these heroines, is Ovid writing like a woman, or writing "Woman" like a man?

Using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to examine the "female voice" in the Heroides, Sara H. Lindheim closely reads these fictive letters in which the women seemingly tell their own stories. She points out that in Ovid's verse epistles all the women represent themselves in a strikingly similar and disjointed fashion. Lindheim turns to Lacanian theory of desire to explain these curious and hauntingly repetitive representations of the heroines in the "female voice." Lindheim's approach illuminates what these poems reveal about both masculine and feminine constructions of the feminine.

"Mail and Female opens up whole new vistas of interpretation within Heroides scholarship, perspectives that will shed light not only on the poems themselves, but demonstrate the usefulness of Lacanian theory to classics. Lindheim's scholarly command both of Lacanian psychoanalysis and of classical philology is superior."-Micaela W. Janan, Duke University ... Read more

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Since it first appeared in 1961 this has been the standard critical edition of Ovid's love poems. For this new edition the text has been thoroughly revised to take account of published scholarship and the further thoughts of the editor. Conjectures have been admitted to both text and apparatus criticus more freely than in the first edition. Punctuation has been improved, spelling has been normalized, and the long poems have been paragraphed. The apparatus criticus now incorporates the reading of the important Berlin manuscript Hamilton 471; it has also been streamlined by the omission of explanatory material more conveniently accessible in commentaries. ... Read more

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Why Are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape? raises feminist issues in a way that reminds people why they matter. We eavesdrop on the vivid student characters in their hilarious, frustrating, and thought-provoking efforts to create strong and flexible selves against the background of representations of women in contemporary and classical Western literature. Young women working together in a group make surprising choices about what to learn, and how to go about learning it. Along the way they pose some provocative questions about how well traditional education serves women. Equally engaging is Kahn's own journey as she confronts questions that are fundamental to women, to teachers, to students and to parents: Why do we read? What can we teach? and What does gender have to do with it? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

teaching insights
Madeleine Kahn invites readers behind the scenes of a college class to discover how a teacher teaches.Readers learn her goals, her methods, and how actual classroom reaction alters planning.It's a Must Read for those planning a teaching career; Kahn reminds us what the teacher's job really is and how to bend without losing sight of the real goals.

Literature is her field, but any teacher will learn from this insightful book.

Why Are We Reaching Ovid's Handbook on Rape? by Madeleine Kahn
This book does something both unique and important: it really listens to women students, and it takes them seriously.In describing her own learning experiences as a professor of English at Mills College, Madeleine Kahn is honest and open about her own anxieties and her role in her classrooms.As a result, this book has much to teach professors and teachers of fields outside of English.

Kahn's great contribution here is to recognize that young women students these days (and some not-so-young students) are reading literature and examining art with an eye to finding positive role models for themselves.Even when such an approach is patently inappropriate, as when students criticize an 18th-century actress for not being independent enough, it is so common a phenomenon that college teachers should take it into consideration when preparing to teach.I have encountered the very reactions, in my classes, that Kahn describes: women students become enraged at a female character in an ancient text for being "passive," or at the male author of a text that they consider hostile to women.They then become enraged at the teacher for giving them the objectionable text.In my experience, this sequence of events is universal in all-female classes (which can occur even at co-ed institutions).But I have learned that women students, even in co-ed classes, have strong and hostile reactions to literary depictions of sexual abuse and exploitation, and they don't hesitate to aim their hostility at their instructors (probably more at female teachers than at male teachers).

Kahn shows, painstakingly, with sympathy and humor, how she learned to maneuver through these very personal, motivated readings, and how she learned from them. Her open-ness to learning from her students, and her readiness to be challenged by them, allowed lively, challenging, and exciting discussions.She also demonstrates that these students brought out new and useful insights into some very old works of literature, precisely because of their almost overwhelming tendency to identify personally with the female characters in these texts.Further, she shows how many of the questions and issues raised by her students are the very questions addressed by complex, sophisticated literary theory: how can a woman "read" male-centric texts?Is the author responsible for every reader's reaction?

Highly recommended for anyone who teaches the kinds of literature that deals with issues of gender, violence, and other disturbing subjects.

Why You Should Read Kahn's Text
Kahn speaks matter-of-factly about her experiences teaching literature to the students of Mills College.She is very open and specific when relating the events that lead up to and after her classes.Revelations about her teaching, purpose in the classroom, and relationship to her students are clearly related in concrete description.

Kahn spends a significant amount of time in her text addressing ethical issues in practice.She speaks of the responsibility she bears as the teacher of the class, the power that that role automatically assumes and the importance of not misusing that power.Kahn also includes specific class discussions in which her students questioned her power and/or tested it and she describes her responses in detail.

Of course the most pronounced voice is that of Kahn.The text is told from the first-person perspective and intentionally invites the reader to participate in the dialogue she is offering by positioning the reader as both "teacher" and "student" in her examples.She states "your participation in this book will be, like my experiences of my own classes, usually engaging, at times confusing, often startling, and ultimately thought provoking" (Kahn, 2005, pg. 6).In addition to Kahn, the composite students have a voice and they are represented through 10 years of her classroom notes.A particular strength of this text is the fact that Kahn avoids specialized language.Although she speaks about teaching and teaching literature, she does not load her text with vocabulary that represents pedagogy or critical theory.The entire text is a reflection of the practice of teaching and specifically, teaching literature.Kahn provides specific examples in which she describes various teaching techniques she utilized.

The interests of Dr. Kahn are served by the text as she able to express the questions that emerged in her years of teaching at Mills College, as well as her feelings and understanding of how those questions impacted not only herself but her classes.Her text is also serving other teachers whether they teach only women or both sexes.Kahn's descriptions and insights into her own experiences resonate and represent examples of common experiences.Mills College seems to be served by the work of Dr. Kahn as well.Students are represented in a positive light, struggling to understand who they are, how their education will serve them and what the connection is between them and the texts they are reading.

The models of practice used by Dr. Kahn are not ratified in any way.She clearly admits to experimenting with her classes in an effort to understand the issues that they are bringing up during discussion.However, once she saw the results of not controlling the discussion and allowing students to express their thoughts, even those seemingly too personal as a result of the texts under examination, Kahn continued to follow this "model" she saw emerging.

Dr. Kahn presents in the text that the model created and practiced is not an individual act but a group one.Without her students contributing, voicing their opinions and sharing their experiences, her insights regarding the importance for female students to speak out and think critically would not exist.The contribution that Kahn's text makes to the understanding and realization of democratic forms and processes is that it openly advocates that female students typically don't feel as if they have a voice and more importantly, "at women's colleges we think about women-it is crucial to what my students learn about themselves and about the roles they might crate for themselves" (Kahn, 2005, pg. 4).In learning about themselves, these women create "new and provocative versions of the books we have discussed, along with new possibilities for both teaching and learning in collaboration" (Kahn, 2005, pg. 6).


Kahn, Madeleine Dr. (2005).Why Are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape?: Teaching and Learning at a Women's College.Boulder, Paradigm Publishers.

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Written by a leading Shakespeare scholar, this book is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favorite poet, Ovid. Bate examines the full range of Shakespeare's works, identifying Ovid's presence not only in the narrative poems and pastoral comedies, but also in the Sonnets and mature tragedies. Demonstrating how profoundly creative Ovid's influence was, especially in his representations of myth, metamorphosis, and sexuality, this original and elegantly written study reveals Shakespeare as an extraordinarily sophisticated reader of Ovidian myth and as a metamorphic artist as fluid and nimble as his classical original. ... Read more

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a beautiful work
With his usual clarity and lack of bias and hyperbole Bate shows Ovid's influence on WS. A useful index helps greatly in looking for that influence on specific works. ... Read more

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Body has been one of the main preoccupations of current Renaissance historiography and current critical theory. Both the literary representation of the body and the construction of the material body in Renaissance anatomical and medical discourses have been used to explore the dynamics of early modern sexuality, gender, and society. Yet the influence of Ovid's texts on the construction of the Renaissance discourses of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity has not been fully explored.

This collection of original essays uses contemporary theory to examine Renaissance writers' reworking of Ovid's texts in order to analyze the strategies in the construction of the early modern discourses of gender, sexuality, and writing. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I explores literary and dramatic allusions to Ovid in relation to early modern ideologies of subjectivity and anxieties about identification and desire. Part II illustrates the appropriation of Ovidian myths by poets and dramatists interested in the articulation of agency. Part III demonstrates how various points of intertextuality between Ovid and English Renaissance writers ranging from Marlowe to Milton contributed to early modern epistemologies and discourse of embodiment, spectatorship, and print culture. ... Read more

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This book is a study of Ovid and his poetry as a cultural phenomenon, conceived in the belief that such a study of tradition also casts fresh light on Ovid himself.Its main concern is with exploring the influence of Ovid on literature, especially English literature, but it also takes a wider perspective, including, for example, the visual arts.The book takes the form of a series of studies by specialists in their fields, including a number of scholars of international renown. The essays cover the period from the twelfth century, when there was an upsurge of interest in Ovid, through to the decline in his fortunes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are critical and comparative in approach and collectively give a detailed sense of Ovid's importance in Western culture. Topics covered include Ovid's influence on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Dryden, T. S. Eliot, the myths of Daedalus and Icarus and Pygmalion, and the influence of Ovid's poetry on art. ... Read more

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Ovid's epic poem, the Metamorphoses, and its great myths were a source of life-long inspiration to Shakespeare. This book provides a comprehensive examination of Shakespeare's use of the poem throughout his career: in early works such as Venus and Adonis and Titus Andronicus, works of the middle period such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, and the late plays such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Drawing on the expertise of leading international scholars, it also includes the first survey of twentieth century criticism and methodology in the field. ... Read more

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'The Love Books of Ovid' is a combination of four books of the Roman poet's verse translated into prose. This volume includes 'Amores' or 'The Loves', 'Ars Amatoria' or 'The Art of Love', 'Remedia Amoris' or 'Love's Cure', and 'Medicamina Faciei Feminae' or 'The Art of Beauty'. Considered to be a master of the elegy form of poetry, Ovid, is faithfully represented here in this English prose translation. Students of classical literature and fans of romantic poetry will both delight in this volume of works by Ovid. ... Read more

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Bringing together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends, Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant Metamorphoses describes a magical world in which men and women are transformed - often by love - into flowers, trees, animals, stones and stars. First published in 1567, this landmark translation by Arthur Golding was the first major English edition of the epic, which includes such tales as the legend of Narcissus; the parable of Icarus; and the passion held by the witch-queen Circe for the great Aeneas. A compelling adaptation that used imagery familiar to English sixteenth-century society, it powerfully influenced Spenser, Shakespeare and the character of Elizabethan literature. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Will appeal to adolescents and young adults as well as adults
"Shapeshifters: Tales From Ovid's Metamorphoses" is a stunning new retelling of the fabulous tales from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," beautifully bound and illustrated by the award winning Alan Lee, who was awarded an Oscar in 2004 for Art Direction of "The Lord of The Rings," peter Jackson's famous film trilogy. "Shapeshifters" retells in modern prose and poetry some of the most famous of the Metamorphoses tales from Ovid. The spider woman Arachne, Actaeon the hunter become a stag, Midas and the Golden Touch, Theseus and the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, Jupiter and Io, Baucis and Philemon, the tales of Persephone, Bacchus, and Tiresias, all these mythic tales and more are retold in language both as fresh, ancient, and rich as its original creator could ever wish. "Shapeshifters" is the modern reinterpretation of something like Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales," another, older retelling of these wonderful stories. Fortunate is the child who receives such a precious gift and rich is the soil in which its heady visions have been implanted. "Shapeshifters" will appeal to adolescents and young adults as well as adults. ... Read more

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"Someone clever, passionate, and heartbroken comes very near us, and I think it is Ovid. I found it impossible to stop reading these poems. And poems they are." -- Richard Wilbur.

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This persuasive book describes the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline analyzes what happens when Renaissance authors revisit Ovid's stories of violence and desire, paying close attention to the ways in which his subversive representations of gender, sexuality and the body influence later conceptions of the self and erotic life. This vividly original book makes a profound contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature. ... Read more

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First published in 8 A.D. when he was 52, Ovid's epic poem contains profoundly entertaining tales of Adonis, Midas, Apollo, Icarus, and many others. (Poetry) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A delightful translation
Slavitt's translation is very free and very accessible. Smooth easy read for the high schoolers with which I am working. Book was in great condition.

good translation
This offers a very concise translation of greco-roman myths. The stories are all there, as is the overall mood of the pieces.

This is good introduction to the Classics.

Ovid's Wild Ride
As a general reader, I neither wanted nor needed a slavishly accurate translation of the original Latin text. What I wanted was a captivating, enthralling, rollicking version of Ovid's poem that would be enjoyable enough to keep me reading through to the end. Slavitt's version delivered, and then some! It passed my "Will this be a fun read?" test: I opened four different translations of "Metamorphoses" to the same point, read a few lines, and asked myself, "Which of these would I want to read for 300 or more pages? Which version is most full of magic and humor and enchantment? Which is the least stodgy, leaden, and plodding?" The winner was Slavitt (Humphries came in a distant second). I repeated the test three or four more times, and my answer was always the same: the Slavitt version is the liveliest, funniest, and least pedantic.

For the less scholarly among us
I can see why, if you are a Latin scholar, or very serious about Ovid, you might be put off by this free translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Slavitt writes, in the middle of Book Seven, that "any sensible poet would lay (the background story) out somehow", and that Ovid has written "footnotes without a text, a quiz, or a gazetteer of distractions, its only sense in what it refuses to say." Useful, interesting opinions, of the sort typically encountered while reading an author's note.But these comments (and others like them) are inserted directly into the text.So yes, I could see how purists would not like that.Although, I have to admit that I loved it.The tone was very conversational, making the translation easy to understand.And now I feel like I have a good grasp of many of the Greek/Roman myths.In my opinion, this is a very approachable translation of one of those books you've always meant to read.

an honest, earnest translation
Slavitt's free translation of Ovid is generally very true to the tone of the original, & only sometimes slightly awkward.Slavitt's understanding of Ovid & of translation is great.The Ovid he presents modern English-speaking readers with is much more human & easily flowing than the Ovid of many other translators.Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the greatest classics of western literature, Ovid one of the most significant writers of our thousands of years of literature, & Slavitt does the man, the book, & readers a good service with this translation. ... Read more

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