In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting power of Ovid’s great poem
Ovid’s wasn’t the first Metamorphoses. Before him, there was Nicander’s Heteroeumena, whose title is usually translated as ‘metamorphoses’, but Nicander’s poem has been lost. It was Ovid’s vast retelling of the great myths of Greek and Roman civilisation that became the definitive classical text on the subject of transformation.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Solid Objects’ is not as well-known or widely studied as some of Virginia Woolf’s other short stories, such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’ or ‘Kew Gardens’, but it is one of the most consummate statements of her modernist aesthetic.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night is perhaps the most perfect: the most technically and structurally accomplished, the most unified in terms of its wordplay and themes and characters, and the most profound. Beneath all of the cross-dressing and mistaken identities, Twelfth Night probes some deep truths about the nature of love.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In a previous post we attempted a ‘summary’ of ‘In the Orchard’, which is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known short stories. But as we observed on Tuesday, it’s one of her most interesting experiments in short fiction because in a sense it’s three versions of the same (very short) story. You can read ‘In the Orchard’ here; below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of the story.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
For the influential Shakespeare critic G. Wilson Knight, Timon of Athens was the most remarkable of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Yet for most readers and critics of William Shakespeare’s work, there’s no getting away from the fact that the general view is that Timon of Athens is one of the least satisfying, successful, or ‘great’ of all of Shakespeare’s tragic plays.