Desiring Bodies

Gregory Heyworth is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

"The three centerpieces of Heyworth's accomplishment—which itself defies the paraphrasing rhetoric of the book-review genre—are the intellectual contextualizations of the works he studies, the dramatic and detailed engagement with Ovidian love, bodies, forms, polity, and 'culture,' and the old-school, detailed close reading of the poets' words and stories." —Studies in the Age of Chaucer"The premise of Gregory Heyworth's book is simple. He takes his title and his subject from the first line of Ovid's Metamorphoses, 'My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies' and tells us, in his 'Polemical Premise' what his book does not do: it does not contribute to 'studies of classical influence in the traditional sense' . . . . it investigates romance literature as a derivation of Ovidian metamorphosis in the sense of the struggle between 'the love of the body as a material thing and as a synecdoche of the larger body of society' (p. ix). It is, therefore, not really about literature or about particular texts but about how a particular literary genre is generated by both the unifying illusion of desire and the ultimate dissociation of the self from the other." —Renaissance and Reformation"From critical and theoretical standpoints, this is an important study of the rich reception of Ovid in the premodern period. It not only complements the scholarship on this topic, but expands it precisely by its theoretical sophistications. . . . this book enriches the field of theoretical approaches to early modern Ovidian discourses by demonstrating how theories of social dynamics help formulate approaches to poetic creations within a cultural and political sphere." —Sixteenth Century Journal"Desiring Bodies traces the romance from Marie de France to Milton. . . . Heyworth's framework produces elegant readings that are persuasive in illustrating that Ovid's own political context should be brought to the fore more often in considerations of his influence on later literature, as it can illuminate later political contexts and ironic/satirical content, despite the textual and historical mediation of the Metamorphoses and other works." —Speculum"There is much to savor in this excellent volume. With laudable elegance and lexical sophistication, Gregory Heyworth's unique, comparative study soars with ease across the landscape of cultural history in order to bring forth the 'monolithic' Ovidian influence on romance form in a selection of noteworthy medieval and Renaissance authors. With exceptional agility, Heyworth's volume captures the powerful resonance of the Latin Poet's voice through the ages. . ." —Parergon"In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora" ("My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies"). This famous first line of Ovid's Metamorphoses provides the central motif for Heyworth (English, U. of Mississippi) as he traces tensions between form and body in the cultural history of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. He explores those aspects of European culture that prioritize the body and the individual over form and group both in terms of social and political thought and in terms of genre and literature." —Reference & Research Book News"Heyworth has written a sophisticated study of the importance of Ovidian form in the poetics and politics of medieval and Renaissance romance . . . the author demonstrates one of Ovid's central attributes: he was an expert historian of culture and the ways in which individuals desired culture to exist. . . . All six chapters are well written, but chapter 3 is a revelation; in it, Heyworth magisterially examines Ovidian notions of the politics of marriage in the Canterbury Tales, particularly "The Knight's Tale." —Choice"Ambitious in its aims, convincing in its arguments, and frequently surprising in its readings, Desiring Bodies asks us to reconsider how literary works both respond to and adapt the remains of the literary past. By establishing Ovid as the defining figure of formal metamorphoses across literary history, Heyworth opens new possibilities for imagining literary history as a history of literary form." —Jennifer Summit, Stanford University"Gregory Heyworth's Desiring Bodies is a highly original study. It is also very daring—breathtakingly so, at times—in its deep engagement with major canonical writers and texts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from twelfth-century Latin comedy to Milton's Paradise Lost. His remarkable essay is achieved within a stimulating cultural and artistic exegesis of a single Ovidian line in which Heyworth finds his own large subject—the famous first line of the Metamorphoses, in which the poet announces the intention to tell 'of forms changed into new bodies.'" —John Fleming, Princeton University"Desiring Bodies answers the question that might dog Comparative Literature as a discipline, i.e. 'so what?'. In a bravura display of cultural and linguistic range, Heyworth turns his own supple, Ovidian intelligence to Ovidian irruptions from within the civilizing project of romance. Heyworth writes with intense literary inwardness, adroitly turned learning, and pitch-perfect prose." —James Simpson, Harvard University