Afterlife II: The Novel

The Aeneid and Metamorphoses have continued to be rediscovered and reinterpreted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The two world wars which defined the first half of the 20th century forced a reconsideration of all war poetry, particularly the Aeneid, which began to be recognised as a work of art which dealt with loss and lament just as much as glory and patriotism - a work which potentially questioned militarism and imperialism. Meanwhile Ovid's explorations of love, desire and identity chimed with the development of psychoanalysis, while his apparently chaotic epic became a major focus of interest later in the 20th century as post-modernism championed non-linear narratives and questioned the permanence of boundaries. Again, it was Ovid in particular who provided the springboard for many new texts, particularly the short story, which often resulted in dramatically diverse updates of the stories in the Metamorphoses.

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.