Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book

Description

This dissertation explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid‘s Heroides and Metamorphoses were catalogued, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid‘s poetry stimulated the imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid‘s characteristic bookishness—his interest in textual revision and his thematization of the physicality and malleability of art in its physical environments—was not lost upon these postclassical interpreters who engaged with his polysemous cast of female characters. His numerous English protégés replicated and expanded Ovid‘s metatextual concerns by reading and rewriting his metamorphic poetry in light of the metaphors through which they understood both established networks of scribal dissemination and emergent modes of printed book production. My study of Greco-Roman tradition and English "bibliofictions" (or fictive representations of books, their life cycles, and the communication circuits in which they operate) melds literary analysis with the theoretical concerns of book history by focusing on intersections and interactions between physical, metaphorical, and imaginary books. I posit the Tudor book as a site of complex cultural and literary negotiations between real and inscribed, historical and fictional readers, editors, commentators, and authors, and, as my discussion unfolds, I combine bibliographical, historical, and literary perspectives as a means to understanding both the reception of Ovidian poetry in English literature and Ovid‘s place in the history of books. This dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of book history criticism while also modeling a bibliographically enriched approach to the study of late medieval and Renaissance intertextuality.