Narcissus Revisited

Chapter 10 brings the transforming force of reading Ovid’s epic up to the present, by offering a view of the differences in the scholarly situation encountered by two researchers investigating the Narcissus theme at the distance of half-a-century—one in the 1960s, the other in the 2010s. The first part of the chapter gives a view of the scholarly conditions under which Vinge prepared her celebrated work on the Narcissus theme in the mid-1960s. In the second part, Johansson presents an overview of scholarly investigations of the Narcissus theme over the fifty years since the publication of Vinge’s study. The theoretical advances in literary studies as well as the growth of research on the Narcissus tradition has made it difficult to grasp the entire history of the theme. In the resulting divergence of perspectives, there arises an implicit disagreement not only about the meaning of Narcissus, but also about how Narcissus is conceptualized in the first place.