This collection of essays is the product of a conference held at St John's College, Durham in September 2009, an origin evident in the number and range of the chapters. The underpinning concept is the position of Ovid as ‘archetypal exile’ both in the reception of his exilic texts (most overtly Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and the neglected Ibis) and in the utilisation of the figure of Ovid himself as an exilic model. As the editor asserts: ‘This volume contends that Ovid has played a major part in shaping the discourse of exile, acting as an important cultural paradigm for later authors who have found themselves subject to exile or similar experiences of alienation and displacement’ (pp. 9–10). The volume proves that exploration of this paradigmatic position is a most fruitful, enlightening and fascinating project.
I.'s introduction claims that the reading of Ovid as archetype and literary model has allowed writers of the past 2,000 years to ‘articulate a range of experiences of dislocation and alienation via engagement with his exilic work and circumstances’ (p. 2). Certainly, the majority of the chapters of the first section, dealing with pre-twentieth-century poets, find writers potentially articulating their own exclusion or removal from their proper place through Ovidian material. These include Dante, Du Bellay, Milton, the Chevalier de Boufflers, Hugo and Pushkin. B. Witucki's essay on de Boufflers' two-year term in Senegal (1785–1787) is an illustration of an overt (and possibly melodramatic) utilisation of Ovid's exilic writing, as de Boufflers echoes Ovid's language and images in his focus on his ‘triste’ circumstances. Such employment of Ovidian tropes is often more complex. S. Hinds' illuminating chapter on Du Bellay focusses on Du Bellay's specific articulation of linguistic alienation in an ironic inversion of Ovid's isolation. Du Bellay is ‘exiled’ in his employment to Rome, and appropriates the Ovidian motif of linguistic exile to express his homesickness for France and the French language. This exilic motif is illustrated by Hinds in an intriguing comparative reference to Brian Friel's play Translations (1980): ‘I am a barbarian in this place because I am not understood by anyone’ (Friel [1981], p. 64).
Other writers do not exhibit their relationship to Ovid so clearly. F. Cox demonstrates in an interesting and robust essay how Victor Hugo actively and viciously attacks Ovid during his Channel Island banishment whilst simultaneously emulating and competing with him. Hugo's resistance to Ovid as his predecessor is his engagement, as he both overtly borrows from Tristia and claims to trump Ovid in misery. Conversely, as explored by M. Green, the undergraduate Milton is ‘exiled’ from Cambridge, but, it seems, is perfectly happy to be at home in London. E. Zambon finds in the exiled Dante limited echoes of Tristia but also identifies several differences in Dante's exilic discourse which negate an Ovidian comparison. In contrast, L.B.T. Houghton explores how Petrarch's Ovidian exilic metaphor (with roots in both Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto) is clearly indebted to Ovid's writing, but this is not exercised in reference to Petrarch himself. Instead, it is applied to the seat of the papacy being ‘exiled’ from its proper place in Rome to Avignon, engaging with complex implications through the trope. The exilic metaphor is also used by Marvell in ‘A Letter to Dr Ingelo’, explored by P. Hardie, in which the Ovidian model is engaged flatteringly to express alienation from a powerful individual. Also in this section are chapters on translation and text: L. Oakley-Brown on Thomas Churchyard's Tristia of 1572 and I. on the reception of the little-known exilic work the Ibis.
The engagement with Ovidian exilic work is demonstrably subtle and not necessarily employed to articulate similar experiences in two subsequent chapters on more recent poetic writing. S. Harrison's essay on modern poetics of exile focusses on three key themes, dislocation, politics and lament, in the poetry of Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and an astonishing demonstration of the presence of direct transposition of lines from (mostly) Tristia in tracks on Bob Dylan's Modern Times album (2006). Interestingly, Ovid's exilic work has apparently had a significant afterlife in reception specifically in Irish writing (a theme echoed in Friel's Irish-set play, see above). This is evident in Heaney's inclusion by Harrison, and in J.J. Dellner's essay on Irish poets Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon, where the trope of the loss of Ireland surfaces repeatedly, often in the guise of Ovid's work, and most often through reference to the Metamorphoses rather than the more overtly exilic texts. In Boland, this is arguably a result of identification with a model of female experience in the displaced figure of Persephone.
Considered as a whole, the range of texts and responses covered can seem overwhelming and potentially disparate. This is encouraged to an extent by I.'s inclusivity. I. argues that Ovid's revising and polishing of the Metamorphoses and Fasti whilst at Tomis both merits these texts' validity as exilic works and demonstrates how ‘the theme of exile is insistently woven into the fabric of the Ovidian corpus’ (p. 6). However, there are evidently recurrent themes in Ovid's exilic literature which resurface in succeeding works. As set out in I.'s informative and authoritative introduction, these include exile as death, politics (in that banishment is suffered because of literary work: politics leads to censorship, which leads to exile), geographical loci and self-mythologising. These themes establish coherence between the essays, sometimes overtly surfacing in the writers who most clearly engage with Ovid's texts. The fourth theme, that of Ovid's self-mythologising, is most fertile, perhaps, in its creative potential. Not only does Ovid articulate his exile through mythological characters' totemic experience, but the figure of Ovid himself becomes part of the mythology of exile. As I. writes, ‘the author who sought to express his personal circumstances by pointing up their parallels with those of various mythological characters has himself become part of a myth of exile, a myth to which later exiles can themselves turn’ (p. 19). This myth is exploited by writers who model themselves on the ‘Ur-exile’ (or indeed, distance themselves from it), but such mythologising also encourages the poeticising of Ovid's experience in the creative works of prose fiction explored in the final five essays. The reimagining, poeticising and dramatising of Ovid's exile in a clutch of novels, including Roman ‘detective’ novels by David Wishart (Ovid [1995]) and Benita Kane Jaro (Betray the Night [2009]), historical dramatisation by Jane Alison (The Love Artist [2001]), and postmodern, metafictional novels by Christoph Ransmayr (The Last World [1988]) and David Malouf (An Imaginary Life [1978]), constitute the subject for the second section of the volume, on Ovidian exile in modern prose.
This wide-ranging volume will appeal to scholars in a variety of specialisms. The essays explore the creation, perpetuation and reception of Ovid as archetypal exile and his work as the archetypal exilic experience and artistic response, at least in terms of a specifically masculine subjectivity. This relevance in the cultural imagination can evidently not be underestimated, and collectively these essays provide a strong and far-reaching starting point for further study on historical and contemporary reception of the figure of the exiled poet.
