ABSTRACT
Each new generation of story-makers adopted familiar mythic templates and outlines for their storytelling purposes. Even writers, such as Ovid, Aeschylus, and Euripides, who we might consider to be the source of much contemporary literary and cinematic appropriation of myth, were themselves refashioning previous mythical traditions. But a myth is never transported wholesale into its new context; it undergoes its own metamorphoses in the process. Myth is continuously evoked, altered, and reworked, across cultures, and across generations. To cite Barthes again: ‘there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely’ (120). All of these descriptions and critical formulations gesture at the metamorphic and transformative process of adaptation: the term functions literally as well as metaphorically. It is perhaps therefore no surprise that Ovid, the prime author of narratives of metamorphosis and transformation, has proved a particularly rich source for contemporary novelists, poets, playwrights and directors. As this chapter will demonstrate, his complex, generically hybrid texts, such as the Metamorphoses and the Heroides, which self-consciously blend the comic and tragic, appeal to the experimental and metafictional aspects of much modern and postmodern writing. As examples from authors such as Salman Rushdie and Kate Atkinson will indicate, Ovid’s stories of metamorphosis offer a template for the artistic, and ideological, act of adaptation and re-vision; furthermore, specific stories from the Ovidian oeuvre, such as that of the poet-musician Orpheus and his doomed lover Eurydice, will prove to have offered a potent repository for re-visionary artists, attracting as diverse a community as the director Baz Luhrmann and the novelist Graham Swift.
