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The first study of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses, as inherently visual literature, explaining his pervasive importance in our visual media.
List of contents
List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Fade-in: Prooemium; Adages; Part I. Theory and Practice: 1. Cinemetamorphosis; 2. Ovid's film sense and beyond; Part II. Key Moments in Ovidian Film History: 3. D'Annunzio's Ovid and the cinematic impulse; 4. The Labyrinth: narrative complexity, deadly mazes, and Ovid's modernity; Part III. Into New Bodies: 5. Effects and essences; 6. The Beast in Man: not Ovid's, but how Ovidian!; Part IV. Love, Seduction, Death: 7. Varieties of modernism: Orpheus and Eurydice; 8. Love and death; 9. Lessons in seduction; Part V. Eternal Returns: 10. Immortality: philosophy, cinema, Ovid; 11. Ovidian returns; Sphragis: end credits; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His publications include The Persona in Three Satires of Juvenal (1983), Der lateinische Eulenspiegel des Ioannes Nemius (1995), Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015), and Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (Cambridge, 2017). He has edited the Penguin Classics anthology Juvenal in English (2001) and the essay collections Classics and Cinema (1991), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (2001), Gladiator: Film and History (2004), Troy: From Homer's 'Iliad' to Hollywood Epic (2006), Spartacus: Film and History (2007), The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History (2009), and Return to Troy: New Essays on the Hollywood Epic (2015).
Summary
Demonstrates the creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual modes of narrative through the example of Ovid's influence on cinema history in both theory (Sergei Eisenstein, Gabriele D'Annunzio) and practice. Ranges from classic Hollywood and European films to modernism, animation, and contemporary digital media and special effects.
