Schreiben „nach Ovid“: Zu Thematik, Poetik und Textur der Lyrik-Anthologie “After Ovid” (1994) im intertextuellen Zusammenhang moderner Metamorphose-Darstellungen

Abstract

Representations of metamorphotic processes can be regarded as a crucial project of modern literature and poetry. They are closely connected to reflections about the identity of man and nature, about time and mortality, about the mutability of bodies – and about artificial creation itself as a process of transformation. Popular culture and its visual media also illustrate the significance of transformation and transmutation concepts for contemporary discourses and imaginations, and European as well as American writers of literary fictions recently referred pointedly to Ovid as their ancestor and to Ovid's “Metamorphoses” as their hypotext. In 1994, James Lasdun and Michael Hofmann published an anthology of lyrical texts written by different authors under the programmatic title “After Ovid”. The book is composed according to the structure of Ovid's book, and the poems re-formulate Ovid's mythological narrations in various manners. They can be regarded as representative expressions of the interest of modern and postmodern literature in the idea of metamorphosis. Often they are even explicitly auto-referential.