Among Barbarians. Ovid, The Classics and The Creative Writer

Abstract

Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected life into areas once considered essential to an education, but now under threat in many universities. At degree level it has created an opportunity to re-engage with the classics by its insistence on its own history, while its non-traditional methodologies provide a different way for students to engage with early texts. Ovid's Metamorphoses lends itself to Creative Writing development. Such students, who are used to engaging with a subject practically, will have been equipped with the tools necessary to work with this. Their creative mindset allows the main work of reinterpretation necessary for the study of such early stories. The study for clues which point towards earlier methods (repetition, formal patterns, framework structures) which occur in such primary literature allows students to realise the evolution of a story, and understand that this is never a static process, but one of continuous engagement which the Metamorphoses above all others, seems to welcome.