Changed forms, migrating identities : Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the posthuman

Abstract

It has been stated that the concept of metamorphosis as it operates in Ovid’s poem has never been satisfactorily understood, nor has its significance been fully appreciated. In short, to define metamorphosis as it functions in Ovid’s ancient cosmos of “mutatas formas,” or “changed forms,” has often been considered as an exercise in defining the undefinable. In yet another attempt to define the ever-shifting configurations of the Ovidian universe, Philip Hardie has described the Metamorphoses as “a gigantic repertory of aetiologies for phenomena in the natural world, a world that is at once an image of the one in which we live, and also a pointedly artificial and fictive remaking and doubling of that world.” [excerpt]