“Written just over two thousand years ago, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one of the key works of Western culture. Nevertheless, it is also a work that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the culture it belongs to, namely that the human is the pinnacle of creation, that the world is organized in a hierarchical and immutable order of being, that change and becoming are secondary and epiphenomenal events in the vast panorama of existence, and that the realms of nature and culture are completely set apart from each other. Written at the dawn of Christianity (7 CE), Ovid portrays reality as perpetual transformation: of humans into stones, plants, and animals; of gods and stones into humans; of animals into stars or constellations. Often metamorphoses are partial or lead to mismatches between the bodies and the minds of the metamorphosed entities: a human mind may persist in a vegetal body or the mind of a beast may take hold of human corporeality. These and related features of Metamorphoses make the text strikingly relevant and contemporary in the twenty-first century, as posthumanist theory attempts to recover many of the facets already present in Ovid’s masterpiece. Metamorphoses Reimagined is an original rethinking of the fifteen books comprising Ovid’s text in multiple genres, ranging from letters and essays to poetic passages and dramatic dialogues, from diary entries and confessions to prayers and newsreels, from meditations and loose fragments to exegeses and lamentations. Some envision “the morning after,” picking up the narrative thread where Ovid leaves off. What does Lycaon do after he becomes a wolf? Can Echo and Narcissus be reunited? What is the fate of Arachne after she has been transformed into a spider? Others follow the mythic events in an alternative manner: in first-person confessions, such as those of Ino and Athamas, or in daily diary entries, like Leucothoe’s. Others still offer unconventional interpretations of parts of Ovid’s poem: for instance, the idea of cross-species interbirth and interdeath in the myth of Cadmus sowing dragon teeth or the inversion of the relations of subservient and dominant in the story of Europa’s capture by Zeus/Jove”–
