Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination

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Ovid's Metamorphoses offers a compelling site for reconsidering the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. The poem's recurrent theme is the physical transformation of humans into other life forms, a theme that invites readers to consider how human and non-human agencies have evolved from and adapted to one another in a relationship characterized by fluctuating perceptions of friction and symbiosis, distance and proximity. This volume of essays traces the variety of ways in which the world of the Metamorphoses offers a set of structures for modelling the relationship between humans and other agencies within the biosphere in ways that answer to many of the precepts of contemporary eco-criticism. The contributors make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in this ancient text as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate in many ways. Their papers also scrutinize a number of critical moments in the history of the text's ecological reception (including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of important Medieval and Renaissance receptions of Ovid) in an attempt to recuperate the Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the history of environmental thought.