Monstrous Texts and Textual Monsters: Transgressive Hybridity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

Ovid’s Metamorphoses are a treasure trove for marvellous creatures, hybrids, monsters, and deformed bodies. The text itself is a poetic hybrid combining features from different literary genres, including epic, elegy, pastoral poetry, tragedy, and comedy. Ovid’s monsters – Medusa, the Minotaur, Centaurs, or Scylla – embody his poetic program: creating an intricate narrative labyrinth with many heterogeneous components, metareferential puns, and ironic digressions from the well-established classical canon, Ovid follows in the Callimachean tradition that appreciates poetically refined, creative experiments with traditional aesthetics. The monstrous Metamorphoses embrace extraordinary corporeality, alterity, and the subversion of norms. Recent critical theories and gender studies provide the conceptual background for the analysis of Ovid’s poetics of transgressive hybridity in this thesis.