Lauren KNIFTON

SUPERVISED BY: Dr. Jennifer Ingleheart

TITLE: Myth, Genre and Authorial Self-Referentiality in Ovid’s Tristia and Ex Ponto.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

 My PhD explores how Ovid’s Tristia and Ex Ponto contribute towards the understanding of Ovid’s play with genre, which is in turn connected with the author-persona relationship throughout the whole of the Ovidian corpus. The project will approach the author-persona relationship by examining how Ovid utilises mythological references to construct his persona in literary terms, alluding to characters which either appear earlier within his corpus or are new additions. I shall adopt Hinds’ (1985) methodology of investigating mythical references by exploring their appearances in earlier Ovidian texts, which can be re-assessed in the light of exile, before returning again to re-read the exilic passages. In addition, exploration of how Ovid evokes accounts of myths produced by other authors in a variety of different genres will afford an examination of the ramifications for understanding exilic mythological references. Since Ovid deploys various versions of myths self-reflexively, these works contain an intense concentration of allusions to different genres, and an assessment of how such generic play operates will contribute to the examination of the relationship between myth and authorial self-referentiality. My PhD aims to demonstrate that the Tristia and Ex Ponto, inasmuch as they deploy the play of genres to construct authorial identity in a novel fashion, can be viewed as the culmination of Ovidian self-construction via generic game-playing, evident as early as the opening of the Amores.

More information on my PhD project can be found on my personal website. For the British Academy funded conference on 'The Reception of Rome and Construction of Western Homosexual Identities' which I am organizing together with Jennifer Ingleheart, please visit the conference website.