“How Strangely Chang’d”: The Re-creation of Ovid by African American Women Poets
Issue Date
2018-05-31Author
Morrison, Rachel C.
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
92 pages
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
M.A.
Discipline
Classics
Rights
Copyright held by the author.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This project examines the re-creation of Ovid by African American women poets. Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved Black woman writing in colonial America, engages with Ovid’s account of Niobe in her epyllion “Niobe in Distress.” Henrietta Cordelia Ray, who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, picks up where Wheatley left off in a sonnet called “Niobe.” Elsewhere, in “Echo’s Complaint,” Ray also imagines what Echo might say to Narcissus if she had full control over her words—an imaginative exercise that has resonances with Ovid’s Heroides. Finally, in her 1995 book Mother Love, the contemporary poet Rita Dove re-examines the tale of Demeter and Persephone from a number of different angles. In reworking the Metamorphoses, all three poets paint vivid images of vulnerable girls and bereft mothers. Moreover, Wheatley, Ray, and Dove play with Ovidian elements to explore themes of repetition, voice, motherhood, and power dynamics.
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- Classics Dissertations and Theses [90]
- Theses [3901]
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