Book Description

The Ars Amatoria is a poem about sex and poetry, and poetry as sex. Witty and subversive, it is a poem of seduction about seduction: the seduction of the `implied' reader being initiated into the art of love, and ourselves, as we are seduced by the poet into the act of reading the poem. This book offers a new and sophisticated critical assessment of the poem, based on the close analysis of certain passages, whilst at the same time being concerned with the reading of Ovidian poetry generally. Dr Sharrock's study is overtly theoretical, influenced in particular by deconstruction and reader-response theory, with an emphasis on intertextuality. In it she discusses a range of original and important issues: the traditions of didactic poetry and of elegy; the nature of the addressee in literature; the relationship between author and reader, speaker and addressee; poetic self-display; digression and relevence; programmatic theory and poetic value under the sign of Callimachus. This is an important and innovative work, which should be of interest not only to classicists but also to literary critics and theorists in English and other literatures.