Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2

The Art of Love , or Ars Amatoria , is a poem about sex and poetry, and poetry as sex. Witty and subversive, it is a poem of seduction about seduction: the seduction of the implied reader being initiated into the art of love, as well as the actual reader being seduced by the poet into the act of reading the poem. This sophisticated but accessible reading of the poem focuses on the relationship between the poet and reader, the lover and the seduced--both here and elsewhere in Latin poetry. The book translates all Latin quotations, and should prove a new, exciting, and provocative contribution to Latin literary criticism.

Alison Sharrock is a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Keele.