Ovid: The Poet and His Work - Hardcover

"Holzberg's Ovid is a comprehensive, witty reading of one of Rome's great poets. This is a book on Ovid you can take to any classroom, desert island, or, for that matter, the beach."-James Tatum, Dartmouth College "Having read, admired, and favorably reviewed the original German book, I am delighted that Cornell now offers us a fine translation. Holzberg's thereby becomes the best analysis of Ovid for the general reader in English."-William S. Anderson, University of California, Berkeley "Ovid: The Poet and His Work is a stimulating, timely, and useful introduction to Ovid's entire oeuvre"-Karl Galinsky, University of Texas at Austin "In sum, Ovid: The Poet and His Work for the most part fulfils its remit as a lively overview of Ovid's poetry, and is a volume which will be of great interest to the student and general reader alike. Above all, Holzberg exhibits a real (and contagious) delight in the poets humour as well as his cleverness. . . His confidence and clarity of style make this an eminently readable book."-Rebecca Armstrong, The Bryn Mawr Classical Review 11/21/2002. "With this study, Holzberg provides ample reason for revisiting, and enjoying, Ovid's immediacy, literary skill, and psychological insight."-Gerald J. Russello, The New Criterion, January 2003. "Holzberg, a distinguished classicist, does a marvelous job of educating us about the elegiac tradition and its relationship to the modern novel, the sources of Ovid's inspiration, his complex wit, his enormous craftsmanship, the great intelligence that underlies his sexological instructions. This very nice translation from German renders the best available and indeed the most enjoyable book for the general reader on Ovid to English-reading audiences."-Virginia Quarterly Review 179:2 "The book is intelligent and benefits from Holzberg's study of Ovid's love poetry."-Choice, March 2003 "Holzberg brilliantly argues that the poet's entire oeuvre forms what he views as an 'erotic novel', beginning with a eulogy of the deified Augustus as he ascends in glory to Heaven."-Erich Segal, Times Literary Supplement, December 6, 2002, No. 5201

The Roman poet Ovid is enjoying a renaissance. Though relegated to the margins in the Romantic period, since the mid-1980s he has become popular again, not only with classicists and other lovers of ancient poetry, but also with poets and prose writers. He himself is the protagonist of a number of recent novels and stories, including Jane Alison's The Love Artist, Derek Mahon's Ovid in Tomis, and David Malouf's An Imaginary Life. Ovid's greatest work, the Metamorphoses, has inspired authors such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes to publish retellings of certain of his stories of transformation.The distinguished classicist Niklas Holzberg offers a highly readable, concise yet comprehensive overview of all of Ovid's varied works, giving each stage of Ovid's career its due and allowing no text to be diminished by serving as a prelude or epilogue to others. In addition, Holzberg's own insightful, frequently witty observations infuse the book, resulting in a rounded vision of a storyteller Holzberg finds to be distinctly modern.