Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Metamorphosis – Mythology – Poetry »

The paper explores the structure of Mykhailo Orest’s poetry, delving into its main elements such as concepts of time, forest, silence, and word, as well as the motives of eschatologism and reincarnation. It focuses on the ideological and aesthetic originality of Orest’s poetry, examining his views on the nature of language and the essence of art. The distinctive feature of Orest’s poetry is a metaphor of time that comprises various philosophical meanings, including the eschatological understanding of time as “the world of the night,” the era of “the departure of God,” and “the end of things” as opposed to the concept of “the eternal day.” Orest’s eschatological poetics is rooted in medieval imagery and biblical metaphors. His poetic vision of the Apocalypse combines motives and images of diverse meanings and origins. Orest’s pantheism is seen as growing from romantic aesthetics, primarily the works of German romantics. The poet’s pantheistic ideas find expressive reflection through the cult of the forest, the symbolism of trees, particularly the archetype of the world tree. They are also related to the myth of birth and death, interpreted in Orest’s poetry, and the motive of metamorphosis. Medieval mythology takes a special place in Orest’s poetic world. In particular, the poet reinterprets the myths of Grail, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser. The creative thought of Mykhailo Orest was constantly in search — a romantic inclination towards the irrational to a conscious interest in the world of things and the establishment of a complex system of relationship with it.

The Communicating Vessels of a Hybrid Poetics: Myth as Intermedial and Intercultural Osmosis in the Oeuvre of Nikos Engonopoulos In 1938, the year of the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Gallery Beaux-Arts in Paris, the poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos created Birth of Orpheus and Genesis of Myth. The depiction of the birth of young Orpheus as emblematic of the construction of myth recalls the mythopoetic process as articulated in the anthology of the poet, psychoanalyst and photographer Andreas Embeirikos, Writings or Personal Mythology (1936-1946): “Each myth’s becoming is a child who grows up.” This reception of myth should be situated in the context of the French surrealists’ endeavour to formulate a new collective mythology that would respond to the political and social environment of the interwar years. This collective mythology resorted to cultural topoi that were deemed countercultural, marginalised or anti-Enlightenment, ranging from primitive, prehistoric and Gothic art to magic, alchemy and mythological traditions of archaic or non-European cultures. In this framework, surrealist myth was reconfigured as a new poetic language in constant metamorphosis that could articulate through diverse media and cultural traditions the surrealist vision for the radical transformation of the world. In Greece the appropriations of classical myth were central to the modernist canon. However, the Greek surrealists transformed myth in subversive ways initiating a dialogue with the present in the light of anthropology, ethnography, history of religions and psychoanalysis. Recent research has shown that Embeirikos and Engonopoulos conversed with French Surrealism and their colleagues’ engagement with alternative epistemologies and comparative religion and mythology, participating to a fecund renegotiation of the past. This paper aims at contributing to the revision of the history of Surrealism in Greece by exploring the function of myth, both as intermedial language and discursive practice, in Engonopoulos’s work. Most specifically, it purports to investigate the poetic anthologies Do not Speak to the Driver (1938) and The Clavichords of Silence (1939) alongside visual works he created at the end of the 1930s, such as the drawing SO4H2 (1937), and the engraving Vierge inviolable, métaphysique et surréaliste-sonore (1930s). The subtitles given initially to the aforementioned anthologies allude to the comparison of the arts and the equation of poetry and painting in an alchemical fusion pursued by the historical avant-gardes and Surrealism. Engonopoulos’s work and his experimentations with image-making should be revisited within this context and seen as a paradigm of the formulation of a new myth that sought to interweave the visual arts, poetry and alternative epistemologies into a revolutionary, hybrid form of expression that could effect the individual and society.

By applying the methodology of transdisciplinary studies, this work examines the phenomenon of Narcissism and narcissistic artistic character in the autobiography of Salvador Dali "I am the genius" (The Secret World of Salvador Dali), in the paining "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus", and in Dali's original poetry through the prisms of mythology, psychoanalysis and psychosexuality by constructing of the narcissistic character (artistic "Persona") as a model for identity strategies in contemporary art practices. The text is analysing some of Dali's unique personality characteristics and creative and personal expression, with a special insight into his childhood and the term of narcissistic personality structure according to Sigmund Freud, also analysing the key-role of Gala Dali. The text includes some postulates of the art movement of Surrealism that Dali applied in his work, from the "Surrealism Manifesto" and the Surrealism practices. In a case study, the text analyses the painting "Metamorphosis of Narcissus", its content, symbolism, style and visual elements. A possible influence of Sigmund Freud is described, and Dali's original method of "Critical Paranoia" is elaborated. The closing sections are describing the fascinating dimensions of the personality cult that Dali and his narcissistic character reached in the last years of his life. A special focus is made on the musealisation of Dali - his numerous museums and bequests, memorials and collections, the founding of which has contributed to the building of a permanent monument to the artist and finally to the establishment of his status of a mythical personality - the "Dali" brand.

The understanding of law in Ancient Greece was based on the religious interpretations of human nature and natural laws. Two Greek goddesses were representatives of justice and fairness. In the ancient sources Themis is presented as a goddess and prophetess, one of the Titans and the daughter of Gea and Uranus. She is a symbol of divine order, justice, natural law and good customs. Dike, the daughter of Themis, is the goddess of justice and truth, the protector of rights and courts of justice, the arbiter, the symbol of honor, the goddess of revenge and punishment. In early Greek culture and poetry, the terms themis and dike represented justice in the meaning of cosmic order, natural law, and legality. The paper analyses the Hellenic notions of justice, fairness and legality embodied in the phenomena of themis and dike. Nomos (law) is just only if it is in harmony with themis, and law is valid only if it is just. The paper presents the doctrines of Hellenic writers, poets and playwrights on justice and law, with special reference to the influence of mythology on Hellenic law. Publius Ovidius Naso’s work „Metamorphosis”, which speaks about Themis’ role in the creation of the world and the salvation of the human race is one of the greatest sources about this goddess. In Homer’s „Iliad” and „Odyssey”, epics that sing of the heroic spirit, justice is shown in the motives, intentions and behavior of the participants in the event, mostly heroes. The poet Hesiod, famous for the poems „Theogony” and „Works and Days”, moves away from the heroic virtues of people and portrays the gods as bearers of moral power and guardians of justice. In the light of legislative reforms, Solon’s dike represents the progress and well-being of society through economic reforms, which is why justice and injustice refer only to legal and illegal acquisition of wealth and its effect on the community. Aeschylus’ „Oresteia” shows the principle of justice based on talion, according to which the punishment has to be identical with the committed crime. One of the greatest Ancient Greek playwrights, Sophocles, based his play „Antigone” on the conflict between the laws of men and the laws of gods. According to Herodotus, the greatest Ancient Greek historian, the actions of the gods govern human destinies and historical events. The idea of justice in Ancient Greece was all throughout its transformation based of the universial concept of natural balance.

La literatura nace con el mito, en tanto relato de una cosmovisión, y especialmente la poesía se ha nutrido de la mitología en todo su desarrollo. En España ha sido así sobre todo en épocas como los siglos de Oro, en que las Metamorfosis de Ovidio tuvo una amplia repercusión. También la poesía española contemporánea presenta esta influencia, incluso en los periodos en que el realismo y la conciencia social eran predominantes. En este artículo se repasa minuciosamente la presencia continuada y abundante de los mitos en la poesía de José Manuel Caballero Bonald a lo largo de toda su trayectoria. Literature is born with myth, as a story of the cosmos, and poetry has been particularly linked to mythology along the years. In Spain, was mainly so in the Golden Age, when Ovid’s Metamorphoses had a wide impact. Spanish contemporary poetry also has this influence, even in periods when realism and social consciousness were predominant. This paper closely studies the ample presence of the myths in the poetry of José Manuel Caballero Bonald.

Meta/morphosis is a long-form poetry that acts as the rationale behind wider doctoral research as a practitioner-researcher, which uses performance research as a well-being intervention for young people with socio-emotional mental health conditions through the vehicle of mythology. The rationale behind my research – which explores the navigation of human emotion and aims to create pathways to new becomings () – creative writing felt like the only apt medium. The poem meanders around the original form of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – inspired by the way in which the intertwining internal monologues and visceral feelings of the characters were never too much and, in fact, spurred on. The justification for and exploration of this mode of writing takes the form of a commentary, as is commonplace for ancient texts in Latin and Greek to be presented with an accompanying linguistic commentary. The ‘commentary’ is cut together side by side to the poem as a praxis to emphasize the materiality of how the two ideas can touch and influence/change their form (; ; ; ; ). The poem was performed in 2022 – the exploration of this practice allowed me to fully immerse myself in the epistemology and methodology of what I am hoping to do; it gave grounding to now move forward and begin research with the epistemology, methodology, practice, theory and ethics intertwined.

The research object are constant elements of urban space in B. Shakhovsky’s cycle “Poems about Astrakhan”. The article studies the main hallmarks of Astrakhan text, which form the plot of a super-genre unity. The key images and motifs of cycle not only reflect the topography of the capital of the Caspian Sea, its biogeographic, cultural features and architectural appearance, but also reveal the semiotic potential of the city, combining two types of chronotope – water / river and desert. Folk legends and ideas about Astrakhan as a border space form the macro plot. Historical metamorphoses, defining changes in the image of the poet's native land in the context of destructive and creative Soviet mythology, play a special role in the dynamics of the lyrical narrative. The motif of the path performs a structure-forming function in the text of B. Shakhovsky. The architectonics of the text is governed by the principle of juxtaposition of two time layers – past and present. Change of subjects of speech in the poems of the cycle, movement from neutral to “I”- and “we”-narrative is stipulated by conjugation of two storylines: historical and biographical. The research methodology involves a combination of semiotic and structural approaches to the test, methods of motivic, intertextual and mythopoetic analysis.

In the article, the contemporary human being’s search for values is primarily linked to the folkloristic reflection of Lithuanian cultural landscape. Following the framework of hermeneutics and based on the folkloristic symbolism of landscape in Lithuanian folklore (mainly in the oldest layer of folk songs), the manifestations of a long-lasting solidarity between community and nature are discussed. The focus has been placed on the small community – the family and its immediate relationship with the surrounding nature. In the introductory part of the article, the notion of ritualism is discussed which is based on the universally acknowledged concept of the rites of passage (les rites de passage). Within the context of this concept, the depiction of the public events of family life (the rituals of marriage and death) constituted a solid premise for the investigation of the so-called common places (loci communes) in Lithuanian folk poetry, which in this regard are usually represented by landscape-related narrative segments and symbolism. Folkloristic interpretations of the prominent elements of Lithuanian landscape (trees, water, stones) have been selected for the investigation. The introduction also reveals the importance of a family over an individual in the exploration of a human being’s relationship with the surrounding nature. The first part of the article ‘The Reflections of Anthropomorphic Reception of Trees’ asserts that in the folk songs marked by archaic stylistics, the poetic narrative of trees contains abundant mythopoetic allusions to the constant identification of a human being (usually, a family member) with a tree, as well as other metamorphoses and motifs which attest their mutual dependence. This poetic tradition influences the poetry created by individual authors to this day. The article briefly introduces the meaning of a tree in the world of ancient Lithuanian beliefs and customs and notices the major changes in the purpose of the image of a tree in the late tradition of romances. The second part of the article analyses the long-term trajectories of mythopoetic depiction of water and stones in folklore. It is well known that any traditional culture has accumulated a wide range of meanings which pertain to different forms of water and connote rebirth, renewal, as well as fertility and life. Therefore when the article emphasizes the tropes of being near water, drowning in watery depths, which through the lens of myth and ritual embody the act of love (marriage) in Lithuanian singing folklore, it should be noted that this variation of meaning found in Lithuanian folklore constitutes an organic part of the whole of international aquatic symbolism. The mythicised story of a live stone as reflected in folklore could be partially associated with the folkloristic reception of trees and water. Animation of a stone is revealed through the attribution of the qualities of a live being to a stone (in the legends, they move, communicate with each other, live in families). Contrarily, the lifelessness (immobile state) of a stone is mythicised in cases where people who deviate from moral laws are turned into stones. The mythologem of a stone as the landmark signifying the boundary between this and the other world, as well as the association of stones with sacrality and sacred places visited by deities, is widespread. It is ascertained that the narrative of the sacrality of stones did not cease in the period of Christianity.Therefore, the landscape approach applied in this study provided a possibility to observe how, in folklore, the meanings of different components of landscape organically combine into a cohesive union which operates on the principles of synergy. A conclusion may be drawn that folklore unequivocally asserts the idea of a continuous coexistence of a human being and nature and exalts the perception of nature as an essential spiritual value.

The article considers the interpretation of the lunar symbols of V. Goloborodko's poetry in the folklore and mythological context. The poetry of this representative of the Kyiv School is analyzed in line with mythological representations of both world culture and ethno-national mental principles. The mythological thinking of the artist is represented through the verbal poetical system of images, axiology and ontology concepts, etc. The article establishes that, in the interpretation of the lunar mythology, V. Holoborodko refers to fairy tales, fantasy elements, folk symbols, magical and ritual actions, transfigurative metamorphoses, etc. The simile metaphors in the author's artistic texts are decoded through explanations of the author's individual cosmology. It is determined that the lunar symbols in the poetry of the "Kyiv man" are capable of transforming into objects, can float in water, magically affect nature and man, health and vigor, interact with spirits, dryads, mermaids, transform into a sensual image. In the poems by V. Golobolrodko, the symbol of the Moon is used in the texts that are stylized as folklore (fairy tales, legends, rituals, spells, etc.). Irrational perception of the image of the Night Orb becomes the basis for modeling the myth-poetic world picture of the representative of the Kiev School of Poetry. The paper proves that the myth-making of any writer is implemented through the ethno-mental foundations of the worldview, the archaic genomes of humanity, folk-poetic components, the collective subconscious and the empirical personal experience of the artist. Particular sensual images in poetic works operate in line with ancient ideas and beliefs, analytical and visual cogitative process, individual perception of concepts and the surrounding reality, specific emotional state. Lunar symbols in the poetry of V. Holoborodko are interpreted in conjunction with other verbal poetic images traditionally inherent in Ukrainian folklore.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

Ce travail construit une dantologie transcendantale fondée sur la fécondité et la légitimité du commentarisme français tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle. Le nom et l’œuvre de Dante progressent dans la vie de l’esprit et de la culture après la sidération de la Révolution, avec la naissance, l’apogée, le déclin et les suites métamorphosées du Romantisme. Un amour soumis à la loi de la divisibilité de quelques fragments de la Divine Comédie se transforme graduellement en une première dantologie. Des figures archétypiques issues de domaines hétérogènes donnent une armature conceptuelle et poétique à cette double spirale entrecroisée : la lecture des textes de Dante éclairée par la critique contemporaine ; et la compréhension des morphologies divergentes du Romantisme en la diversité de ses moments. Dante est un penseur de l’histoire, des enjeux politiques, du christianisme jusqu’en ses limites internes et externes, du fait initiatique, de la différence sexuelle dans laquelle UN POETE SE TRANSHUMANISE PARCE QU’IL EST AIME PAR BEATRICE APRES AVOIR ETE GUIDE PAR VIRGILE. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval et Hugo sont les parangons d’une lecture tournée vers un usage libre, infidèle mais hautement créateur. Fauriel, Ozanam et Aroux représentent la volonté d’une critique raisonnée de la doctrine philosophique et théologique dantesque. Dante et son œuvre s’inscrivent au cœur des mille agitations d’un dix-neuvième siècle qui reconfigure la France et l’Europe. La rémanence de l’espérance du voyageur cherchant à revoir les étoiles et à contempler la Trinité influence les réminiscences du progressisme plurivoque. La figure d’airain du poète acrimonieux et vengeur accompagne les esprits désenchantés. Celui qui devient l’égal des dieux après avoir affronté une Dame qui tue autant qu’elle ennoblit inspire les mystiques et ceux qui cherchent une nouvelle spiritualité. Le chantre de la foi, revenu dans le giron de l’Église après la conversion de son amour, réchauffe les catholiques. L’homme qui dédouble les pouvoirs comme les soleils de Rome devient un interlocuteur privilégié après l’Empire. Nous ne cherchons pas une liste exhaustive, thématique ou chronologique, notionnelle ou par auteur. À travers des exemples ayant valeur de paradigmes, nous montrons comment cette union de connaissance et d’usage créateur construit des FIGURES de Dante qui entrent en écho avec les inquiétudes et les espérances, les attentes et les angoisses, du Romantisme. Alors Dante et son « Poème Sacré » ne sont plus seulement des occasions de références. Ils deviennent un MYTHE au cœur du rapport entre mystique religieuse et initiation par l’Éternel-Féminin, engagement dans l’histoire et culte de la Beauté, aspiration à un sursaut régénérateur du monde et conscience amère du tragique de la scission entre l’Idéal et le Réel, mythe du Tombeau et promesse d’élévation spirituelle. Parmi les voies possibles, NOUS DEFENDONS UN DANTE SE VOUANT AU CULTE INITIATIQUE DES TOMBEAUX ET DES « DAMES QUI ONT L’INTELLECT D’AMOUR. » Il appartient à un catholicisme élargi, dilaté – le catholicisme transcendantal de Maistre qui assume son ésotérisme arcane fondé sur la polysémie des textes et la liberté accordée par Dante au commentaire. L’auteur de la Divine Comédie s’inscrit dans un Romantisme de plus en plus sombre, antimoderne, à la fois POUVOIR D’ANAMNESE D’UNE GRANDEUR ABOLIE ET PROPHETE D’UN MONDE EN GERMINATION, qui reprend ses thèmes : les questions de la laïcité, de la langue pour le peuple contre celle des dieux, de l’aspiration à l’idéal et à la communication du visible et de l’invisible, de la puissance métaphysique de la Dame. Notre Dante est celui qui doit choisir « l’autre voie », celle de la catabase nécessaire avant l’anabase ; et qui doit faire preuve de la plus grande piété envers les ombres. Alors ce Dante et ce Romantisme « ne descendent pas sans raison dans l’abîme » : ils y trouvent, notamment par la puissance de la parole, la promesse de l’Esprit
This work builds a transcendental dantology based on a leibnizian paradigm of a perennial philosophy. Dante's name and work get on gradually in the life of spirit and French culture, after the astonishment of the Revolution, with the birth, the apogee, the decline and the transformed sequels of Romanticism. One love submitted to the rule of divisibility in direction of some fragments of the Divine Comedy turns into a first dantology. Archetypal figures coming from heterogeneous domains provide a conceptual and poetical framework at this double-crossed spiral: the reading of Dante's texts enlightened by present-day criticism; and the understanding of the divergent morphologies of the various moments of Romanticism. Dante appears as a thinker of history, political stakes, Christianism even in his internal and external limits, initiatory fact, sexual difference in which A POET BECOMES TRANSHUMAN THANKS TO BEATRICE'S LOVE AND VIRGIL'S GUIDING. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval and Hugo are the paragons of a reading going to a free use, inaccurate but highly creative. Fauriel, Ozanam and Aroux represent the quest of a reasoned criticism of the philosophical and theological dantean doctrine. Dante and his work got included in the heart of thousands occasions of unrest of a nineteenth century that reconfigure France and Europe. The persistence of the hope of a traveller attempting to see once more the stars and contemplate the Trinity influence the reminiscences of progressivism in many aspects. The brazen figure of an acrimonious and revengeful poet goes with disenchanted minds. The one that becomes a companion of the other gods after struggling with an ennobling and killing Lady inspire the mystics and those who look for a new spirituality. The faith apologist, once he has got back into the bosom of the Church thanks to the conversion of his love, warms up the Catholics. The man who divides into two the powers as the suns of Rome turns to a favoured speaker after the Empire. We don't look for an exhaustive, thematical, notional, chronological or nominal list. But, through examples as paradigms, it's shown how that union between knowledge and creative use builds, in less than a century, some figures of Dante that echo with the concerns and hopes, expectations and anguishes, of Romanticism. In this way Dante and his "Sacred Poem" aren't reductive to citations occasions. They become a myth at the heart of the relation between religious mystic and initiation thanks to the Eternal-Feminine, commitment in history and cult of Beauty, craving for a world-wide regenerative burst and being aware of the tragic scission between Ideal and Real, myth of the Tomb and promise of spiritual elevation. Among the various possibilities, WE DEFEND A DANTE DEVOTED TO THE INITIATORY CULT OF THE SEPULCHRE AND THE "LADIES WHO GOT THE INTELLECT OF LOVE." He belongs to a broadened, dilated Catholicism - the transcendental Catholicism by Maistre, that takes on his Arcanum esotericism based on the polysemy of the texts and the freedom granted by Dante to the commentary. The author of the Divine Comedy takes place in a more and more gloomy, antimodernist, Romanticism; BOTH THE ANAMNESIS POWER OF AN ABOLISHED GREATNESS AND THE PROPHET FOR WORLD IN GERMINATION that picks his themes up again: questions of laicity, popular language in front of the gods 'one, aspiration at the Ideal and at the link between visible and invisible, metaphysical power of the Lady. Our Dante is the one who has to take care of "the other path", the catabasis before the anabases; and who has to show up the highest devotion toward the shadows. Then, this Dante and this Romanticism don't journey to the "deep randomly": here they find, in particular thanks to the power of Speech, the promise of the Spirit

Ce travail construit une dantologie transcendantale fondée sur la fécondité et la légitimité du commentarisme français tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle. Le nom et l’œuvre de Dante progressent dans la vie de l’esprit et de la culture après la sidération de la Révolution, avec la naissance, l’apogée, le déclin et les suites métamorphosées du Romantisme. Un amour soumis à la loi de la divisibilité de quelques fragments de la Divine Comédie se transforme graduellement en une première dantologie. Des figures archétypiques issues de domaines hétérogènes donnent une armature conceptuelle et poétique à cette double spirale entrecroisée : la lecture des textes de Dante éclairée par la critique contemporaine ; et la compréhension des morphologies divergentes du Romantisme en la diversité de ses moments. Dante est un penseur de l’histoire, des enjeux politiques, du christianisme jusqu’en ses limites internes et externes, du fait initiatique, de la différence sexuelle dans laquelle UN POETE SE TRANSHUMANISE PARCE QU’IL EST AIME PAR BEATRICE APRES AVOIR ETE GUIDE PAR VIRGILE. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval et Hugo sont les parangons d’une lecture tournée vers un usage libre, infidèle mais hautement créateur. Fauriel, Ozanam et Aroux représentent la volonté d’une critique raisonnée de la doctrine philosophique et théologique dantesque. Dante et son œuvre s’inscrivent au cœur des mille agitations d’un dix-neuvième siècle qui reconfigure la France et l’Europe. La rémanence de l’espérance du voyageur cherchant à revoir les étoiles et à contempler la Trinité influence les réminiscences du progressisme plurivoque. La figure d’airain du poète acrimonieux et vengeur accompagne les esprits désenchantés. Celui qui devient l’égal des dieux après avoir affronté une Dame qui tue autant qu’elle ennoblit inspire les mystiques et ceux qui cherchent une nouvelle spiritualité. Le chantre de la foi, revenu dans le giron de l’Église après la conversion de son amour, réchauffe les catholiques. L’homme qui dédouble les pouvoirs comme les soleils de Rome devient un interlocuteur privilégié après l’Empire. Nous ne cherchons pas une liste exhaustive, thématique ou chronologique, notionnelle ou par auteur. À travers des exemples ayant valeur de paradigmes, nous montrons comment cette union de connaissance et d’usage créateur construit des FIGURES de Dante qui entrent en écho avec les inquiétudes et les espérances, les attentes et les angoisses, du Romantisme. Alors Dante et son « Poème Sacré » ne sont plus seulement des occasions de références. Ils deviennent un MYTHE au cœur du rapport entre mystique religieuse et initiation par l’Éternel-Féminin, engagement dans l’histoire et culte de la Beauté, aspiration à un sursaut régénérateur du monde et conscience amère du tragique de la scission entre l’Idéal et le Réel, mythe du Tombeau et promesse d’élévation spirituelle. Parmi les voies possibles, NOUS DEFENDONS UN DANTE SE VOUANT AU CULTE INITIATIQUE DES TOMBEAUX ET DES « DAMES QUI ONT L’INTELLECT D’AMOUR. » Il appartient à un catholicisme élargi, dilaté – le catholicisme transcendantal de Maistre qui assume son ésotérisme arcane fondé sur la polysémie des textes et la liberté accordée par Dante au commentaire. L’auteur de la Divine Comédie s’inscrit dans un Romantisme de plus en plus sombre, antimoderne, à la fois POUVOIR D’ANAMNESE D’UNE GRANDEUR ABOLIE ET PROPHETE D’UN MONDE EN GERMINATION, qui reprend ses thèmes : les questions de la laïcité, de la langue pour le peuple contre celle des dieux, de l’aspiration à l’idéal et à la communication du visible et de l’invisible, de la puissance métaphysique de la Dame. Notre Dante est celui qui doit choisir « l’autre voie », celle de la catabase nécessaire avant l’anabase ; et qui doit faire preuve de la plus grande piété envers les ombres. Alors ce Dante et ce Romantisme « ne descendent pas sans raison dans l’abîme » : ils y trouvent, notamment par la puissance de la parole, la promesse de l’Esprit
This work builds a transcendental dantology based on a leibnizian paradigm of a perennial philosophy. Dante's name and work get on gradually in the life of spirit and French culture, after the astonishment of the Revolution, with the birth, the apogee, the decline and the transformed sequels of Romanticism. One love submitted to the rule of divisibility in direction of some fragments of the Divine Comedy turns into a first dantology. Archetypal figures coming from heterogeneous domains provide a conceptual and poetical framework at this double-crossed spiral: the reading of Dante's texts enlightened by present-day criticism; and the understanding of the divergent morphologies of the various moments of Romanticism. Dante appears as a thinker of history, political stakes, Christianism even in his internal and external limits, initiatory fact, sexual difference in which A POET BECOMES TRANSHUMAN THANKS TO BEATRICE'S LOVE AND VIRGIL'S GUIDING. Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval and Hugo are the paragons of a reading going to a free use, inaccurate but highly creative. Fauriel, Ozanam and Aroux represent the quest of a reasoned criticism of the philosophical and theological dantean doctrine. Dante and his work got included in the heart of thousands occasions of unrest of a nineteenth century that reconfigure France and Europe. The persistence of the hope of a traveller attempting to see once more the stars and contemplate the Trinity influence the reminiscences of progressivism in many aspects. The brazen figure of an acrimonious and revengeful poet goes with disenchanted minds. The one that becomes a companion of the other gods after struggling with an ennobling and killing Lady inspire the mystics and those who look for a new spirituality. The faith apologist, once he has got back into the bosom of the Church thanks to the conversion of his love, warms up the Catholics. The man who divides into two the powers as the suns of Rome turns to a favoured speaker after the Empire. We don't look for an exhaustive, thematical, notional, chronological or nominal list. But, through examples as paradigms, it's shown how that union between knowledge and creative use builds, in less than a century, some figures of Dante that echo with the concerns and hopes, expectations and anguishes, of Romanticism. In this way Dante and his "Sacred Poem" aren't reductive to citations occasions. They become a myth at the heart of the relation between religious mystic and initiation thanks to the Eternal-Feminine, commitment in history and cult of Beauty, craving for a world-wide regenerative burst and being aware of the tragic scission between Ideal and Real, myth of the Tomb and promise of spiritual elevation. Among the various possibilities, WE DEFEND A DANTE DEVOTED TO THE INITIATORY CULT OF THE SEPULCHRE AND THE "LADIES WHO GOT THE INTELLECT OF LOVE." He belongs to a broadened, dilated Catholicism - the transcendental Catholicism by Maistre, that takes on his Arcanum esotericism based on the polysemy of the texts and the freedom granted by Dante to the commentary. The author of the Divine Comedy takes place in a more and more gloomy, antimodernist, Romanticism; BOTH THE ANAMNESIS POWER OF AN ABOLISHED GREATNESS AND THE PROPHET FOR WORLD IN GERMINATION that picks his themes up again: questions of laicity, popular language in front of the gods 'one, aspiration at the Ideal and at the link between visible and invisible, metaphysical power of the Lady. Our Dante is the one who has to take care of "the other path", the catabasis before the anabases; and who has to show up the highest devotion toward the shadows. Then, this Dante and this Romanticism don't journey to the "deep randomly": here they find, in particular thanks to the power of Speech, the promise of the Spirit

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the encyclopedia of pagan mythology for later centuries, was also pressed into the service of Christian theology. This chapter shows how three Christian poets—Prudentius, Dante, and John Milton—reworked metamorphosis into a snake, each in his own specific way. The central text is Metamorphoses 4.569–603, where Cadmus and his wife Harmonia are transformed into snakes in fulfilment of a supernatural prophecy, the ultimate consequence of Cadmus’ slaying of the serpent of Mars on the site of Thebes. While the metamorphosed Cadmus falls physically to the ground, in the Christian authors serpentine metamorphosis signifies a theological and spiritual fall. In the late fourth century, Prudentius projects the transformation on to Satan, while Dante in the early fourteenth century exploits Ovidian metamorphosis into snakes for the punishment of sinners in Inferno. Milton, a reader of both Prudentius and Dante, applies the metamorphosis to Satan, but in a very different way from Prudentius. Each of these Christian poets explores the motif of serpentine metamorphosis in their own language, and within their own culture. The demonic repetition of falls into serpentine metamorphosis also figures the repetitive migration of the Ovidian motif through the Christian centuries.

Abstract Few, if any, Greek or Latin authors have had greater influence on the reception of classical mythology than Ovid. The Metamorphoses is paramount in this regard, but Ovid’s entire oeuvre engages with mythology and mythography both by anticipating aspects of his magnum opus or by taking a pointedly different approach from it. Two aspects of Ovid’s work are mutually informing but readily distinguishable from each other. First, like other poets, Ovid reacts in sophisticated ways to earlier poetic treatments of specific myths. This aspect has to do with establishing his place in the canon of ancient Greek and Roman writers who were essential reading for any educated, cultivated person. Second, Ovid also appropriates the forms and procedures of mythographic scholarship in prose. The structure of the Metamorphoses, for instance, resembles that of a mythological handbook or encyclopedia, e.g., the one ascribed to Apollodorus, or of a universal history, such as that of Diodorus Siculus. It seems likely that Ovid meant his debt to both traditions, the literary and the scholarly, to be apparent, and that the energy generated through hybridization—by crossing “elevated” poetic genres with more “utilitarian” prose ones—is what makes Ovid so valuable to the artistic and scholarly reception of ancient mythography.

Abstract My interest in Greek mythology began in the early 1980s and led to my writing two collections of poetry based on Greek mythology: Metamorphoses (1988), which centers on female figures in Greek myth, and Listening to a Far Sea (1998), which is mainly about male figures. At the time I began, I was aware of the way myths could offer insight into some of the abiding patterns and themes in human experience-developmental issues, the quest for freedom and self-realization, finding a place and way of being in the world, the facing of death and suffering-and I soon became acquainted with the work of writers such as Christine Downing (1996) and Ginette Paris (1990) who were using myth as a tool of personal differentiation and cultural exploration with a specifically feminist focus.

In the beginning, Ovid’s depiction of Jupiter accords with the usual elegiac fare. There is a certain amount of rivalry, as Ovid fears Jupiter might steal his girl; some flippant one-upmanship, as Ovid drops Jupiter-cum-thunderbolt when his girlfriend locks her door; copious irony, as the praeceptor Amoris instructs his pupils to imitate Jupiter in perjuring themselves. Ovid particularly enjoys “correcting” his predecessor Propertius on certain points of Jovian theology. The great works written close to the time of Ovid’s exile add a bitter edge to this playfulness, revisiting elegiac scenarios with a dramatic shift in focalization. Jupiter’s rapes and the suffering they cause are a leitmotif of Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses. In the Fasti, Jupiter is subjected to complex manipulation, instructed, diminished, and reframed according to the poet’s wish-fulfilling fantasies. As Augustus transformed the Roman experience of time by modifying the calendar, so Ovid seizes control of the discourse by shaping the calendar to his own poetic ends. When the thunderbolt strikes, banishing him to the Black Sea, Ovid creates a Jovian/Augustan mythology all his own. Like the Metamorphoses and Fasti, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto show two possibilities for Jupiter, yet the Tristia’s impression of the cruelly wrathful Thunderer predominates over the Ex Ponto’s possibility of revivifying rain. Most importantly, by figuring himself as the heroes and—especially—heroines persecuted by the autocratic ruler of the Olympian pantheon, Ovid defines his poetry and his very self as a work of artistically fruitful, politically hopeless opposition to the new “Jupiter.”

This chapter treats the relationship between philosophy and mythology in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in connection with two famous “problems” of Epicurean philosophy: labor (“toil” or “trouble”) and pestis (“plague”). Labor and pestis come together in Lucretius’ account of the rise and fall of civilization in two passages of De rerum natura, literally in Book 5 and symbolically in Book 6. Ovid recuperates this complex in three passages of the Metamorphoses: the rejuvenation of the earth’s population by Deucalion and Pyrrha after the great flood (1.348–415), the plague at Aegina (7.517–660), and Hercules’ death on Mt. Oeta (9.152–272). The chapter argues that Ovid pointedly undermines the tenets of Epicurean ethics in remythologizing his Latin epic predecessor. His elaboration and refutation of Epicurean ethics in the Metamorphoses exhibits both his characteristic playfulness and the comprehensive knowledge of Hellenistic philosophies that so excited the imaginations of Lucretius and the Augustan poets.

Abstract This chapter surveys the Greco-Roman mythological tradition from the mid-14th century to the late 16th. It begins with Bersuire, who continued the medieval tradition of allegorizing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Boccaccio, who continued the genealogical tradition in his Genealogia deorum gentilium and wrote several additional influential works. Boccaccio was the first humanist scholar to incorporate ancient Greek texts, albeit only the Homeric epics. They were followed in the early 15th century by Salutati, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Lydgate, and several others. The subsequent expansion of Greek studies inspired both poets (Poliziano) and painters (Pollaiuolo, Botticelli) associated with the Medici court, and the late 15th-century interest in ancient theater, sponsored by other northern Italian dynasties, revived Plautus’s Amphitryon and inspired Niccolò da Correggio’s Cefalo. Poliziano’s Orfeo established a mythological pastoral tradition that in the 16th century produced such popular dramas as Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, and such comprehensive syntheses as Sannazaro’s and Sydney’s Arcadia poems. The nonclassical epics of Tasso (La Gerusalemme Liberata) and Ariosto (Orlando Furioso) adapted numerous myths and Greco-Roman motifs. The survey concludes with the important scholarly contributions of Giraldi, Cartari, and Conti, the Florentine Masquerade of 1565, and the mid-16th-century paintings of Titian.