BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 339 contribute to key themes in each poet’s work. For Propertius, they create a variety of ways to explore elegy’s competing claims to emotional immediacy and artful discourse; for Catullus, they participate in defining and interrogating the relationship between poetry as communication and poetry as a social artifact; and for Horace, they help to cast the tension between public life and private relationships as a circumstance that not only conditions but also serves his poetic agenda. I, the Poet is more invested in demonstrating McCarthy’s method than in generating new interpretations of first-person Latin poetry, and McCarthy is explicit about this goal. Her readings “are not meant to correct or substitute for other readings these poems have attracted, but to stand alongside them and enlarge the range of tactics we can use in approaching these poems” (35). As a result, although it is textually grounded in meticulous close readings, I, the Poet still feels experimental, but productively so. The Epilogue on Ovid’s exile poetry shows the potential of McCarthy’s approach to open new angles on further first-person Latin poetry. Because her reading method is designed to examine not specific rhetorical figures or thematic content but the structural strategies that highlight the ambiguity of the first-person speaker, it will be a flexible tool in further readings. Like all innovative methods, McCarthy’s leaves room for refinement, and this is a good thing. For example, although it is fundamental to her readings, she leaves the concept of “storyworld” undefined.1 Because she does concretely explain her use of the terms “story” and “discourse,” this vagueness does not impede her readings, and the storyworld remains a compelling site for further investigation. In incorporating the idea, however, she opens first-person Latin poetry to complementary models of imaginary worlds from, for instance, possible worlds theory and media studies, both of which offer more robust theorization while raising further questions about fictionality and the reader’s role.2 In addition to offering new reading strategies, then, McCarthy in I, the Poet also provides a launchpad for further scholarship. University of Toronto Rachel Mazzara Ovids EnzyklopÈ adie der Liebe: Formen des Eros, Reihenfolge der Liebesgeschichten , Geschichtsphilosophie und metapoetische Dichtung in den METAMORPHOSEN. By Vittorio HÈ osle. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (Bibliothek der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften. Neue Folge. 2. Reihe, 161). 2020. Pp. x, 288. In this book Vittorio HÈ osle sets out to show that the narrative development of the Metamorphoses is determined by Ovid’s focus on an encyclopedic ordo amorum. He argues that this order is in line with the poem’s overall historical-philosophical structure, 1 McCarthy is not alone in this; intuitive definitions of the worlds of story or fiction are common in narratological scholarship. On the vagueness of Gérard Genette’s use of this concept, for instance, and a discussion of the questions that it leaves, see R. Bunia, “Diegesis and Representation: Beyond the Fictional World, on the Margins of Story and Narrative,” Poetics Today 31 (2010) 679–720. 2 See, for example, the essays collected in A. Bell and M.-L. Ryan (eds.), Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (Lincoln 2019); M. J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York 2012). 340 PHOENIX and attributes a “historical consciousness” (“Geschichtsbewußtsein,” 25) to Ovid. The author succeeds in his epic task of analyzing the amatory narratives of the Metamorphoses without neglecting other central episodes and the coherence of the work as a whole. He never loses sight of his central theme as he sheds light on each story and guides the reader through his book. Each chapter heading is accompanied by a caption summarizing the arguments to follow. These captions and the resulting table of contents (vii–x) are unusually detailed, but are, in my opinion, quite helpful, as they allow for a well-founded overview of the book (also useful is the index of real and literary figures, 275–288). In his preface (1–2) Hösle addresses the question of why one should read a book about Ovid’s Metamorphoses written by a philosopher, and presents the advantages of his perspective...