The poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors; banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, in his Tristia (‘Sad Things’) and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the role of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation, and to explore ... More

The poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors; banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, in his Tristia (‘Sad Things’) and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the role of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation, and to explore exile from a number of perspectives, including both the personal and the fictional. The broad cultural impact of Ovid’s exile in Western literature is assessed in the present interdisciplinary volume by bringing together the fruit of the investigations of scholars working across a range of disciplines, including Classics, Modern Languages, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies; the volume should appeal to those working in all of these areas as well as those with a broader interest in exile as a literary and historical phenomenon. The volume’s exploration of the manifold repercussions of Ovidian exile illuminates Ovid’s cross-cultural influence (as contributors explore responses from the ancient world, through the Renaissance, to the modern era), Ovidian authorship (as it analyses how the theme of exile is powerfully interwoven into numerous works by Ovid), and of ‘exilic’ works of art.