Alison Sharrock
Biographic Data
| ID | 1220129 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison Sharrock |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharrock |
| SIGNATURE | SHARROCK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7129-2405 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Deforestation and Reforestation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Ovid’s Metamorphoses can claim to be perhaps the most species-diverse and certainly the most species-fluid poem from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Despite the iconic fame of Daphne, however, trees do and suffer more than act as metamorphic destinations for humans. In this article, I explore two passages, both of which feature trees not primarily as the goal of metamorphosis but as material beings in their own right: the trees uprooted by the…
Sustainable Ovid? Humans, Hunting, and the Environment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
My argument is that one of the ways to ‘sustain’ the reading of Ovidian and other pre-modern poetry in the contemporary world is to explore it through the lens of the greatest challenge of our time, the ecological crisis. In this paper, I take hunting as a trope with which to examine the relationships between different inhabitants of the biosphere, using the stories of Actaeon and of the Calydonian boar hunt to show how Ovid’s Metamorphoses can d…
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future developme…
Greek and Latin Love
Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy
Unlike many studies of the family in the ancient world, this volume presents readings of mothers in classical literature, including philosophical and epigraphic writing as well as poetic texts. Rather than relying on a male viewpoint, the essays offer a female perspective on the lifecycle of motherhood. Although almost all ancient authors are men, this book nevertheless aims to carefully unpack the role of the mother – not as projected by the son…
Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy
Unlike many studies of the family in the ancient world, this volume presents readings of mothers in classical literature, including philosophical and epigraphic writing as well as poetic texts. Rather than relying on a male viewpoint, the essays offer a female perspective on the lifecycle of motherhood. Although almost all ancient authors are men, this book nevertheless aims to carefully unpack the role of the mother – not as projected by the son…
Noua … corpora
This article explores metamorphic outcomes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While the poem may be steeped in constant mutability, for the most part gender emerges as a surprisingly static feature, and one that carries remarkable weight also when read beside the aftermaths of Ovidian transformations. Though there may be no fixed schema that categorically establishes disparities in the final destinations of male and female transformations, I show that ther…
Metamorphic Readings
Ovid’s remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best known and most popular works of classical literature, and perhaps the most influential of all on later European literature and culture. Loved for its vast repository of mythic material as well as its sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences,…
Introduction
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Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Where and how does Ovid’s extraordinary 15-book hexameter poem on stories of metamorphosis fit into the history of classical epic? At the turn of the eras, Latin epic had just found its definitive form in the shape of Vergil’s Aeneid, leaving an extraordinary challenge for anyone who might seek to pile Pelion on Ossa thereafter (to use, along with the Roman poets, the metaphor of Gigantomachy for the writing of epic). Ovid’s response to the Vergi…
Till Death do us Part … or Join
Naso magister erat – sed cui bono?
The poeta-amator, nequitia and recusatio
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Lucretius
CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. Piety, labour, and justice in Lucretius and Hesiod 2. The political epistemology of infinity 3. Lucretius, Epicurus, and the Logic of Multiple Explanations 4. Nature, spontaneity, and voluntary action in Lucretius 5. Seeing and unseeing, seen and unseen 6. The poetic logic of negative exceptionalism in Lucretius, book five 7. Lucretius and the Epicurean attitude toward grief 8. Nil igitur mors est ad nosa Iphianas…
The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy
Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an …
Poetry, Philosophy, Science
The volume unites the three aspects--poetry, philosophy, and science--found in Lucretius' 'De rerum natura'. With ten original essays and an analytical introduction, the volume aims not only to combine different approaches within single covers but to offer responses to the poem by experts from all three scholarly backgrounds--Adapted from the book jacket
Reading Roman Comedy
For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imag…
The theatrical life of things
This paper examines the semiotics of props and other physical items in Plautus’ Curculio. The play is over-determined with props: a candle, a door, fragrant wine, water, a ring, which comes in twice (and has a twin), a letter to go with it, a seal with represented elephant-slaying sword, a missing eye, a bad gut, animal names, like the wolfy banker Lyco, and the weevil-parasite Curculio, and a property manager who comes out for a little chat with…
Latin Poetry other than Epic and Drama
The art of love
'The Art of Love' presents a collection of essays on Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love 'The Art of Love' and 'Cures for Love', offering a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems
Ovid and the discourses of love
All poets speak in quotations. In the decades immediately before Ovid wrote his love poetry, Propertius and Tibullus (and Gallus and Catullus before them) developed an elegiac genre in which the speaker is enslaved to a mistress, and chooses a life of decadence and devotion rather than civic and military success. The poems beseech and reproach the beloved, show her off to friends, and occasionally celebrate her and the relationship, rhetorically …
Gender and sexuality
Ovid has been called sympathetic to women. While many modern feminists would be unhappy about this chivalric designation, there is no doubt that the Ovidian corpus provides a particularly rich site for gendered study. More than any other non-dramatic ancient poetry, male-authored as it overwhelmingly is, Ovid’s work gives space to a female voice, in however problematic a manner, and to both male and female voices which reflect explicitly on their…
The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This…
Intratextuality
Constructing Characters in Propertius
nudus Amor formae non amat artificem "Naked Love does not love an artificer of form" Propertius 1.2.8 One of the major contributions of late republican and early imperial Latin poetry to the course of literature was the development of a subjective, first-personal voice that seems to speak directly to the reader or to the addressee (pretending to ignore the reader), without the framing devices of narrative or dramatic presentation, and without eve…
Constructing Characters in Propertius
nudus Amor formae non amat artificem "Naked Love does not love an artificer of form" Propertius 1.2.8 One of the major contributions of late republican and early imperial Latin poetry to the course of literature was the development of a subjective, first-personal voice that seems to speak directly to the reader or to the addressee (pretending to ignore the reader), without the framing devices of narrative or dramatic presentation, and without eve…
The Drooping Rose
nos quoque delectant, quamuis nocuere, libelli, quodque mihi telum uulnera fecit, amo. ( Tr. 4.1.35f.) My books delight me, even though they have harmed me, and I love the weapon which caused my wound. In Amores 3.7, Ovid sings, hymns, celebrates his own impotence. Why? In stark contrast with its nearest Latin relative, Horace's most grotesque, violent and abusive impotence poem ( Epode 12, to be discussed later), Am. 3.7 is an erotic poem, and c…
The art of deceit
Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading (being deceived while being aware of the deception) is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware rea…
"Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's "Ars Amatoria II
The theatrical life of things
This paper examines the semiotics of props and other physical items in Plautus’ Curculio. The play is over-determined with props: a candle, a door, fragrant wine, water, a ring, which comes in twice (and has a twin), a letter to go with it, a seal with represented elephant-slaying sword, a missing eye, a bad gut, animal names, like the wolfy banker Lyco, and the weevil-parasite Curculio, and a property manager who comes out for a little chat with…
Womanufacture
Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion. This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Lat…
Ars Amatoria 2.123-42
Metamorphic Readings
Ovid’s remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best known and most popular works of classical literature, and perhaps the most influential of all on later European literature and culture. Loved for its vast repository of mythic material as well as its sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences,…
Ars Amatoria 2.123-42
Alternae Voces —Again
There is a persistent tradition of reading Propertius 1.10, according to which the Gallus addressed by the poem is the elegiac poet, and the poem itself is a description, not, or not only, of Gallus and his girl in bed but of Propertius reading Gallus’ love elegy.1 In CQ 39 (1989), 561–2, James O'Hara suggests that the phrase ‘in alternis vocibus’ in Prop. 1.10.10 is a hint at amoebean verse, and as such may refer to the amoebean elegiac experime…
Womanufacture
Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion. This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Lat…
Social Change
Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 2
The Ars Amatoria is a poem about sex and poetry, and poetry as sex. Witty and subversive, it is a poem of seduction about seduction: the seduction of the `implied' reader being initiated into the art of love, and ourselves, as we are seduced by the poet into the act of reading the poem. This book offers a new and sophisticated critical assessment of the poem, based on the close analysis of certain passages, whilst at the same time being concerned…
The Drooping Rose
nos quoque delectant, quamuis nocuere, libelli, quodque mihi telum uulnera fecit, amo. ( Tr. 4.1.35f.) My books delight me, even though they have harmed me, and I love the weapon which caused my wound. In Amores 3.7, Ovid sings, hymns, celebrates his own impotence. Why? In stark contrast with its nearest Latin relative, Horace's most grotesque, violent and abusive impotence poem ( Epode 12, to be discussed later), Am. 3.7 is an erotic poem, and c…
"Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's "Ars Amatoria II
The art of deceit
Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading (being deceived while being aware of the deception) is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware rea…
Intratextuality
Constructing Characters in Propertius
nudus Amor formae non amat artificem "Naked Love does not love an artificer of form" Propertius 1.2.8 One of the major contributions of late republican and early imperial Latin poetry to the course of literature was the development of a subjective, first-personal voice that seems to speak directly to the reader or to the addressee (pretending to ignore the reader), without the framing devices of narrative or dramatic presentation, and without eve…
Ovid and the discourses of love
All poets speak in quotations. In the decades immediately before Ovid wrote his love poetry, Propertius and Tibullus (and Gallus and Catullus before them) developed an elegiac genre in which the speaker is enslaved to a mistress, and chooses a life of decadence and devotion rather than civic and military success. The poems beseech and reproach the beloved, show her off to friends, and occasionally celebrate her and the relationship, rhetorically …
Gender and sexuality
Ovid has been called sympathetic to women. While many modern feminists would be unhappy about this chivalric designation, there is no doubt that the Ovidian corpus provides a particularly rich site for gendered study. More than any other non-dramatic ancient poetry, male-authored as it overwhelmingly is, Ovid’s work gives space to a female voice, in however problematic a manner, and to both male and female voices which reflect explicitly on their…
The Cambridge Companion to Ovid
Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This…
Latin Poetry other than Epic and Drama
The art of love
'The Art of Love' presents a collection of essays on Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love 'The Art of Love' and 'Cures for Love', offering a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems
The theatrical life of things
This paper examines the semiotics of props and other physical items in Plautus’ Curculio. The play is over-determined with props: a candle, a door, fragrant wine, water, a ring, which comes in twice (and has a twin), a letter to go with it, a seal with represented elephant-slaying sword, a missing eye, a bad gut, animal names, like the wolfy banker Lyco, and the weevil-parasite Curculio, and a property manager who comes out for a little chat with…
Reading Roman Comedy
For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imag…
The poeta-amator, nequitia and recusatio
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Lucretius
CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. Piety, labour, and justice in Lucretius and Hesiod 2. The political epistemology of infinity 3. Lucretius, Epicurus, and the Logic of Multiple Explanations 4. Nature, spontaneity, and voluntary action in Lucretius 5. Seeing and unseeing, seen and unseen 6. The poetic logic of negative exceptionalism in Lucretius, book five 7. Lucretius and the Epicurean attitude toward grief 8. Nil igitur mors est ad nosa Iphianas…
The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy
Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an …
Poetry, Philosophy, Science
The volume unites the three aspects--poetry, philosophy, and science--found in Lucretius' 'De rerum natura'. With ten original essays and an analytical introduction, the volume aims not only to combine different approaches within single covers but to offer responses to the poem by experts from all three scholarly backgrounds--Adapted from the book jacket
Naso magister erat – sed cui bono?
Till Death do us Part … or Join
Introduction
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Where and how does Ovid’s extraordinary 15-book hexameter poem on stories of metamorphosis fit into the history of classical epic? At the turn of the eras, Latin epic had just found its definitive form in the shape of Vergil’s Aeneid, leaving an extraordinary challenge for anyone who might seek to pile Pelion on Ossa thereafter (to use, along with the Roman poets, the metaphor of Gigantomachy for the writing of epic). Ovid’s response to the Vergi…
Art (23 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (22 works) · Literature (22 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Poetry (14 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · History (10 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)