The Face of Nature

by Garth Tissol

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as worldplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art.