On Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Ovid’s magnum opus becomes newly relevant for the 21st-century reader in this accessible reconsideration from Williams (Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry), a literature professor at Columbia. While readers ought to “tread carefully” because the tale is “rooted in a culture that’s so distant from our own,” Williams writes that Ovid’s “interest in self-realization at the individual level strikes a timely chord.” In the first chapter, he suggests the epic is a “remarkably flexible, liberating, open-minded” text that bucks conformity and embraces “quirky” personalities, while a section on Ovid’s use of language and his interest in separating fact from fiction shows how Metamorphoses can be applied in “a world in which fake news appears so prevalent.” Elsewhere, Williams covers the poem’s depiction of sexual morality (a “form of inner struggle” that relates to how today “young lives are encouraged to express an authentic, core self” in the face of “social expectation and accepted norms”), and closes with a consideration of the graphic sexual violence and trauma portrayed by Ovid. Smart close readings abound, and Williams’s punchy analyses make the book fun to read, though they never obscure his mastery of the subject. Literature students should give this a look. (Jan.)