Acknowledgments ; Abbreviations ; Introduction; CHAPTER 1; Glittering Trifles: Verbal Wit and Physical Transformation; Transgressive Language: Narcissus and Althea; Indecorous and Transformative Puns; Misunderstanding aura: Cephalus, Procris, and the Pun; Divinatory Wordplay: The Pun Overheard; Vox non intellecta: Irony and Metamorphic Wordplay (Myrrha); Littera scripta manet-Or Does It? (Byblis); Self-Cancelling and Self-Objectifying Witticisms; Wordplay, Personification, and Phantasia; True Imitation: Ceyx, Alcyone, and Morpheus; The House of Reception; CHAPTER 2
The Ass's Shadow: Narrative Disruption and Its ConsequencesSome Exemplary Interruptions; Daedalus and Perdix; Cyclopean Violence and Narrative Disruption; Some Scandalous Passages; CHAPTER 3; Disruptive Traditions; Indecorous Possibilities: Callimachus's Hymn to Artemis and Ovidian Style; Elegiac Contributions: Propertius's Tarpeia and Ovid's Scylla; Epic Distortions: The Hecale in the Metamorphoses; CHAPTER 4; Deeper Causes: Aetiology and Style; Aetiological Wordplay; Ovid's Little Aeneid; Aetiology and the Nature of Flux; Conclusion; APPENDIX A ; G.J. Vossius on Syllepsis Oratoria
APPENDIX B Syllepsis and Zeugma ; APPENDIX C; Further Examples of Syllepsis in Ovid ; References ; Index Locorum ; Index
In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site
