https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/863 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1058 While in Virgil’s Aeneid mothers are evoked sporadically only to be marginalized by the epic’s forward narrative thrust, in his Metamorphoses Ovid pushes mothers centre stage, as subjects and protagonists of their own extended narratives, privileging rather than repressing their voices. This article surveys some of the interpretive and thematic possibilities of placing the maternal at the heart of a reading of Ovid’s epic. It argues that Ovid exploits the metamorphic potential of maternity, its conflation of the boundaries of the body, inside and outside, self and other, and its association with paradoxical roles and extreme passions, to explore and redefine aesthetics and personal relations in the Augustan era. The intense psychic struggles and emotional monologues of Ovid’s mothers, which are linked to motherhood as physical and bodily process, become key elements in this poem’s unprecedented exploration of the contradictory and multiple nature of subjectivity itself. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:23:07 +0200 ven., 08 déc. 2023 12:43:00 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1058 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/851 “The Poetics of Anthropogony: Men, Women, and Children in Lucretius, Book Five” analyzes how Lucretius handles a significant problem in Epicurean accounts of the origins of humans and human culture – namely, how a species that, unlike any other, enters the world “in need of every kind of vital support” (indigus omni uitali auxilio) as Lucretius himself famously writes in an argument against a providential ordering of the cosmos, ever managed to survive. The young nurturing earth plays a crucial role in the early survival of the species, but the earth’s aging necessitates another solution. I argue that this takes the form of the early societies that Lucretius describes in a well-known but puzzling excursus at 5.1011-1027. With the rise of human society, fathers come to take on the role of the young earth in protecting children as well as women, while at the same time taking care to protect themselves through a male community. The passage thus responds not only to Epicurean ideas about justice and friendship but also obliquely addresses, through what I term “poetic logic”, questions of infancy, vulnerability, and care that are generated by the first phases of the origin narrative. mar., 14 juin 2022 11:35:03 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 13:42:51 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/851 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1117 Feminist reading of the classics requires a difficult negotiation between the struggle to be heard and the struggle to avoid appropriation. The aim of this paper is to explore some few words of Virgil, especially those reacting to the mother of Euryalus’ reaction to her son’s death, and those of his readers through the ages, as a paradigm case of a wide theoretical and philosophical issue in feminist literary criticism. The fundamental question asked in this paper is whether feminist readers of the classics should concentrate on listening to differentiated female voices or on arguing for some form of what we might metaphorically call “equal rights” among the protagonists of ancient literature. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:08:50 +0200 jeu., 12 oct. 2023 16:19:54 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1117