Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (PDF)

CORA FOX is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA.

"In Ovid and the Politics of Emotions in Elizabethan England, Fox provides a serious and suggestive reading of the literary history of the emotions - chiefly grief - in late Elizabethan England. By turning to the specifically literary texts through which Elizabethan court poets mediated and meditated on grief, Fox argues for a more flexible model of grieving than scholars have typically associated with mourning and melancholia: she finds agency where psychoanalytic and new historicist critics have characteristically found constraints. In this project, Fox pays close attention to Elizabethan adaptations of Ovid s Metamorphoses, which allows for both the engagement of the passions and escape from their paralyzing effects." - Heather James, Departments of English and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California"An excellent book on a subject that is crucial to modern critical theory in the wake of deconstruction, new historicism, and gender studies; a brilliant examination of Ovid and his relation to gender studies. Fox s Ovidian reading of Titus is the most brilliant reading of that underestimated play . . . Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England belongs in that select group of books dealing with Renaissance literature and classical authors like Leonard Barkan and Jonathan Bate." - Thomas P. Roche, Professor of English, Princeton University