French Literature Reviews - 2026

B. Pavlock, The image of the poet in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Poetry and Poetics

Pavlock, Barbara. The Image of the Poet in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, coll. Wisconsin studies in classics, 2009. 208 pages.

• ISBN 9780299231408
• $55.00

Publisher's description:

Barbara Pavlock unmasks major figures in Ovid's Metamorphoses as surrogates for his narrative persona, highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the Metamorphoses. Although Ovid ostensibly validates traditional customs and institutions, instability is in fact a defining feature of both the core epic values and his own poetics.

The Image of the Poet explores issues central to Ovid's poetics—the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, the reliability of the narrative voice, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry. The work explores the constructed author and complements recent criticism focusing on the reader in the text.

Ovid's simultaneous play to and rebellion against epic tradition makes Narcissus both an idealized elegiac image through allusions to the poet's own mistress in the Amores and an elegiac poet fixated on his own image. Through Narcissus's demise, Ovid reflects the instability of visual images.

In Orpheus's story of Venus and Adonis, an undercurrent of desire in Venus's inset tale reveals a problematic self-involvement. The self-referential nature of Orpheus's song then raises questions about his reliability as narrator, a theme that culminates in Ulysses' contest with Ajax.

Here Ovid undercuts heroic views about lineage and valor, but also highlights the many clever strategies by which Ulysses elevates himself over his rival, undermining Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Ovid questions the authority of the narrator but also provides the means for understanding the problems at the core of his epic. Thus, in his time and ours, the reader ultimately emerges better equipped to assess inherited traditions in literary, social, and political spheres.

Barbara Pavlock is associate professor of classics at Lehigh University and author of Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition.

Classical epic poetry has long invited scholarly inquiry into the relationship between authorial identity and narrative voice. Within the broader tradition of Augustan literature, poets frequently negotiated their relationship to established literary models by embedding self-reflexive commentary within mythological narratives. Barbara Pavlock's study examines how Ovid positions specific characters as reflections of his own poetic practice, highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the Metamorphoses and the tension between traditional epic values and innovative stylistic choices.

The volume explores issues central to Ovid's poetics—the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, the reliability of the narrative voice, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry. By analyzing figures such as Narcissus, Orpheus and Ulysses, the work explores the constructed author and complements recent criticism focusing on the reader in the text. Readers interested in classical literature, Ovidian studies and the history of poetic self-representation may find this analysis relevant to their understanding of Augustan poetry.