The rhetoric of the body from Ovid to Shakespeare

by Lynn Enterline

"This book analyzes the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric, and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston, and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body, and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts to ventriloquize women's voices that are indebted to Ovid's work, she argues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This book makes a contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature."--Jacket.