Proteus: The Language of Metamorphosis by Carla Dente, George Ferzoco, Miriam Gill, Marina Spunta

Abstract

8i6 Reviews Proteus: The Language ofMetamorphosis. Ed. by CARLADENTE, GEORGE FERZOCO, MIRIAM GILL, and MARINA SPUNTA. (Studies inEuropean Cultural Transition, 26) Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. xvi+289 pp. ?50. ISBN O-7546-3957-6. This is a pleasant, often interesting collection of twenty-one essays, put together on the literary trope of metamorphosis, by scholars most of whom were or have been associated with the University of Pisa or the University of Leicester, though what occasion called these collaborations together is not given. The opening chapter dif fers from the others, being an interview with the Brechtian scholar and comparativist Darko Suvin by Carla Dente. This is entertaining, sometimes informative, but in terview it is not, because at no stage is there any probing of what Suvin might or might not have said about metamorphosis, or any position he has taken up, so that his amiable surveying ofmetamorphosis in literature, including thememorable wish that Bakhtin had known Kafka (p. 17), seems very inconsequential. (It would have been good to have had an essay on Kafka's Die Verwandlung in the collection.) The prob lem of lack of focus in the interview is at the heart of the book's problems. There are interesting treatments throughout of metamorphosis, where, even if the argument is oddly peripheral to the subject, the reader can feel that something worthwhile isbeing said. There isRocco Coronato on priapism and The Two Gentlemen of Verona-a play which contains the character Proteus-and an excellent chapter on incest in Pericles (Elisabetta Cori); there is a sound reading of Mephisto (Martin Halliwell), and an interesting one by Marina Spunta on Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem: uma alucinacao, which puts his Portuguese novel into dialogue with Pessoa. Other essays start well but need more elaboration, such as Nicoletta Caputo's piece on Colley Cibber's changes made toRichard the Third. There is one essay on Ovid's Metamorphoses, by Alessandro Perutelli, which makes small points that could have been more developed, and generally the absence of good-or indeed any-work on Ovid in this collection is a disappointment. Itwould have been welcome to see some treatment of the metamorphoses of the thieves in Inferno, where Dante (xxv. 97) thinks of his poetry as outdoing Ovid; but Dante is virtually out of the collection, apart from Enrico Giaccherini's reference to Pier della Vigna (Inferno, XIII. 3I-78). Chaucer is in the collection through an essay on alchemy and on The House of Fame by Michael St John, but considering how Ovidian Chaucer is, there could have been more. John Fyler's book Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, I979) is only one of a number of studies that have appeared on the topic; Michael Calabrese's Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, I994) is another, bringing out a theme inseparable from transformation: the alliance in Ovid between metamorphosis and love, which is also present in Le Roman de la Rose, in Chaucer, and in Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry generally. The anthology is overall short on these historical outworkings of Ovid, settling often for essays on modern texts where the Ovidian theme is slighter, or finding it easier to discuss metamorphosis inways which seem vestigial-the changes in Shelley's reputation, for instance, nicely handled by Julian North, but not convincing the reader that this is the most central sense of literary metamorphosis. When the theme becomes thus disparate, there is a sense of an opportunity squandered a little. UNIVERSITYOFMANCHESTER JEREMY TAMBLING ...