Ovid in and after Exile

Abstract:This study explores three myths from Ovid's Metamorphoses, to which the poet returned in his exile poetry, and their reception in two late twentieth-century European novels. In his final verse collections, Ovid evinces great concern for the enduring fame of the Metamorphoses, and his reinterpretation of metamorphic myth in the exile poetry underlines the potential for their allegorical interpretation. This article charts some of these metamorphic themes, and their allegorical import, in two central European novels of the late twentieth century, which explore Ovid's exile from a postmodern perspective: Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988) and Josef Škvorecký's Nevysvětlitelný příběh aneb Vyprávění Questa Firma Sicula (1998).