The ovidian vogue : literary fashion and imitative practice in late Elizabethan England / Daniel D. Moss.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Moss's research exposes the literary impulses at work in the flourishing of poetry that grappled with Ovid's cultural authority.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Moss (Southern Methodist Univ.) opens new territory in the study of Ovid's influence on Elizabethan narrative poetry, showing that by the 1590s, Ovidian imitation entailed much more than an engagement with Ovid. Rather, as Moss demonstrates, Ovidianism had become a subject of literary contention in which poets competed against the imitative strategies of their rivals in the quest for readers, patrons, and audiences. The author identifies responses from a spectrum of writers, ranging from those who strove to immerse themselves in the Ovidian vogue to those who eschewed or hoped to alter it. The discussion ranges widely over a number of works, many of which are not frequently studied. In the first chapter, Moss looks at Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare; the author devotes subsequent chapters to George Chapman, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and John Donne. This wide range of authors will prove daunting to uninitiated readers, especially because Moss's focus on intertextuality means that individual chapters require being read in the context of the contents of other chapters. Nonetheless, Moss's prose is certainly lucid and accessible to those with some experience, and he provides extensive endnotes. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Enterprising upper-division undergraduates and above. --Bruce E. Brandt, South Dakota State University