Introduction

This special issue is concerned with a multifaceted Ovidian topic: “The Dominant Female in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Gendered Allusions, and Gendered Receptions.” The idea arose in a conversation that I had with Alden Smith at the Université Clermont Auvergne of Clermont-Ferrand in November 2017. Its first step took form in an International Conference organized by Prof. Smith in Texas at Baylor University in February 2019. That conference explored different aspects of rhetoric and freedom of speech in the Late Augustan Age, particularly in Ovid’s works. In the sympotic dialogues that occur naturally enough at such a conference, we spoke also about women’s freedoms in the late Augustan milieu, mostly as represented in Ovid’s literary production. Out of those rich discussions resulted a plan for further work on the topic, which now focused on the panel we had proposed for the FIEC conference, held in London in July 2019. Timing is everything: it is undeniable that 2017 and 2018 were two years in which a paradigm shift occurred vis-à-vis gender dynamics not just in the USA but in many parts of the world. Of course, in classical literature these issues are not new, since they gained strength in the field from the interesting approaches developed in feminist film studies in the 1970s.1 We thought, however, that (re)approaching the topic at this social and somewhat “global” juncture could be of interest; and it was in this particular conference, and now in this volume, we believe, that it is. Smith’s work on allusion and my own stylistic and poetic work on Latin literature allowed us to enlarge such a topic to a more comprehensive examination of one of the most innovative and still challenging aspects of Ovidian writing: that of female characters gaining physical, and psychological mastery over their male objects of desire, within a clear reversal of Roman accepted gendered patterns. From a perspective