cance of unusual items such as electrotypes (copies of copies of Blake’s lost

printing plates), four plates from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell printed
on one page, and “the only Blake manuscript in Canada” (a list of riddles).
This volume is beautifully presented, worthy of the attention to detail
and love of books that it honours; as Brandeis argues, love of books for use.
The ample illustrations, in black and white and colour, are taken from many
sources but predominantly display the rich range of the Bentley Collection.
Reading Blake in Our Time, one becomes convinced that Davies and
Whitehead are right in their shared assertion that, even following Bentley’s
magnificent accomplishments, there is still much promising “archival
groundwork” to be done, if we are to know as much about Blake as we do
about “other major English poets” (188). They, and their fellow scholars,
are right to find that very exciting.
Tristanne Connolly
St Jerome’s, University of Waterloo

Andrew Feldherr. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses

and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton up, 2010. x + 377 pp. $49.50.
Ovid’s last word in the Metamorphoses—“vivam” (I shall live)—has sel-
dom resonated more powerfully than in the scholarship of the last twenty
years. In this period, Ovid has figured resiliently as an ancient poet for
our tempora, richly responsive to contemporary literary critical concerns
from the narratological to the political, gracefully participatory in a range
of theoretical exchanges (for example, reception studies, intertextuality,
psychoanalysis, gender studies). This culturally fluent, wisely irreverent,
and unabashedly contemporary Ovid is the poet studied from a dizzy-
ing—yet compelling—range of conceptual angles in Andrew Feldherr’s
Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Feldherr’s
nuanced, critically sophisticated argument centres on the dynamics of
perspective activated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as its participation
in the forum of vision more generally—concerns pursued both within
the text (that is, in embedded artwork and ecphrasis) and in the sphere
of physical reality occupied by the Roman reader. Attendant upon this
approach is a keen investment in the poem’s relationship to contemporary
visual art, to civic expression and custom, and to modes of reception as
actively imagined (and shaped) by the text. In a challenging argument that
traverses unusually wide disciplinary terrain, Feldherr largely succeeds

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in demonstrating that the Metamorphoses deserves recognition not only
as a literary text that thematically explores vision but as a public artifact
that stood in creative dialogue (and competition) with other forms of civic
expression in shaping how the Roman subject “sees.”
Feldherr’s premise, centred upon an interpretation of metamorphosis
first developed in his chapter on the subject in The Cambridge Companion
to Ovid, edited by Philip Hardie (2002), is that radical Ovidian transforma-
tion creates a “hermeneutic puzzle” for the reader (26), who must continu-
ally reflect on and revise her view of the poem by intentionally adopting
one available perspective and refusing others (which remain strategically
in play for alternative readings). The choice between perspectives—for
example, whether one sees the laurel tree as Apollo sees it or as Daphne
experiences it—often involves a contrast between external and internal
frames of reference, between detached and sympathetic points of view,
and between the priorities of the world (the “real” or “historical”) and
of the text (the “fictive”). These differing “focalizations” (149), Feldherr
contends, function essentially as planes of reception, raising issues of
identification and differentiation between fictional roles that also shape
social relations. Such competing viewpoints also manifest themselves in
contrasting critical interpretations of key aspects of the Metamorphoses,
which Feldherr productively shows are encouraged by the poem’s cultiva-
tion of this aesthetic of double perspective. Feldherr’s approach is broadly
appealing because it, too, straddles perspectives in the form of disciplin-
ary commitments: balancing intensive close reading, often along loosely
deconstructive lines, with an avowedly historicist attention to the public
role of fiction, imperial politics, and material culture, Feldherr thoughtfully
illuminates what he variously calls the “politics of textualization” (77) and
the “political role of literature” (349) exemplified by the Metamorphoses.
Laudably, Feldherr accomplishes this delicate balance between the nar-
ratological and the sociohistorical without oversimplifying either critical
domain; indeed, he incites many a well-studied Ovidian passage to sparkle
afresh in poetic terms when considered as an interlocutor in non-literary
forms of public expression.
Feldherr’s most noteworthy and sustained achievement in Playing
Gods is to incorporate the Metamorphoses’s own attention to the inter-
pretive variables of perspective with a range of public artistic modes that
feature the visual dynamics also active within Ovid’s poem. Ovid’s text
(as it activates a “visual” experience for the reader) is yoked, that is, with
artworks and forms of spectacle which also deploy Greek myth to fashion a
Roman sense of identity. The relationship between the textual and artistic

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spheres is not statically formal but actively reciprocal, both being informed
by an ethic of spectatorship. As Feldherr puts it, “Ovid generates a dialogue
between what his text can make a reader see and other forms of ritual
that operate largely through vision” (147). The forms of visual spectacle
examined here are those that shaped the public life of Rome in the age
of Augustus, and all contain a performative dimension that assumes the
interpretive participation of the spectator: imperial monuments, sacrificial
ritual, dramatic performance (especially tragedy), triumphal procession,
gladiatorial spectacle, visual art in various media, and mnemonic devices
employing visual architectonics based in domestic space. Building on
recent trends in the field of art history, Feldherr assumes the status of
such public artworks as “texts,” that is, as hermeneutic objects whose sig-
nificance is not primarily aesthetic but, instead, powerfully social in their
capacity to activate forms of reception that shape each viewer’s sense of
status and civic identity.
The book consists of seven chapters organized into three overarching
parts. Part one, on “Fiction and Empire,” first lays the groundwork of the
argument concerning metamorphosis and perspective with exemplary
readings of the Io and Daphne episodes, enriched with attention to the
multiple narrative levels of the Pirithous episode as they evoke friction
between the domains of truth-telling and fiction. Then, it provocatively
explores how the competing perspectives of poetic representation and
historical reality play out in Ovid’s engagement with Augustus in the
Metamorphoses—a topic that has too readily lent itself to oversimplifica-
tions of pro- or anti-Augustan stances as forming the entire spectrum
of response available to Ovid. Here, Feldherr identifies a reciprocity, or
dialectic, between Ovid’s poetic perspective and imperial ideology, result-
ing not in a simple opposition but a subtle “competition between imperial
artist and artistic emperor” (83). The perspective of Augustus’s histori-
cal reality is thus countered by that of Ovid’s poetic world, and both of
their claims to authority are destabilized as Ovid reveals that he and the
emperor are in effect “authors” of change pursuing immortality yet are
also subject to the very forces they attempt to master. Indeed, Feldherr
suggests, the poet speaks to an extent as emperor while implying that the
emperor likewise acts as poet by authorizing historical discourse under-
girded with fiction (for example, in official ideologies of succession that
rely on Caesar’s apotheosis and in visual monuments that appropriate the
language of myth). A lively reading of the Daedalus episode demonstrates
how the issues of hierarchy and artistic power raised by Augustus’s pres-

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ence extend to the levels of social difference that can be inhabited by the
reader within a single narrative.
Part two, “Spectacle,” shifts more fully into the social realm to consider
how the participation of Ovid’s early readers in a civic sphere replete with
representations shaped their perspectival encounter with the Metamor-
phoses. Arguing that Ovid “construct[s] a civic dimension to the act of
reading and provide[s] a new sphere to measure the powers of the poet”
(167), Feldherr provides stimulating readings of Lycaon and Pythogoras in
the context of sacrificial ritual; of the Theban sequence (particularly the
deaths of Actaeon and Pentheus) in relation to gladiatorial spectacle; and
of the Philomela story as it resonates with tragedy and issues of ethnic
identification linked with the categories of Greek, Roman, and “barbar-
ian.” As is occasionally the case in this book, the strengths of the section
on Philomela overlap closely with its weaknesses: argumentative density
threatens to overwhelm digestibility (to indulge a cannibalistic pun) as
the author nuances the episode’s evocation of tragic performance with
a diverse range of contexts including the Platonic critique of mimesis
as involving dangerous forms of identification, the civic dimensions of
Greek myth critically reimagined as Roman exemplum, the motion of
tragic temporality toward repetition and regression, and the intertextual
dialogue between Metamorphoses and Fasti raised by the Philomela myth,
particularly as it involves an articulation of civic identity. Despite Feld-
herr’s acknowledgement of the meandering nature of the chapter in an
apologia on page 236, the reader is hard pressed to keep the argument in
clear view, and some fine points are left struggling for the light.
Part three, “Ovid and the Visual Arts,” contends first that Ovid’s visual
tableau of Europa with the bull serves to “deconstruct … contemporary
ways of viewing” (255), then links Pygmalion’s statue, read through the
preceding episode of the Proproetides and Cerastae, with rituals of sac-
rifice that evince “a degree of overlap between aesthetic and religious
judgments” (276). A reading of Metamorphoses 2, which takes us from
the solar Apollo’s house to Invidia’s infection of another domestic space,
interestingly identifies resonances with the visual dynamic of the “memory
palace.” Finally, Niobe and Perseus instantiate Ovid’s creative exploration
of Augustan iconography, as the former summons “ecphrastic ambigui-
ties” (310) appropriate to a mortal turned statue who occupies a position
that at once legitimizes and threatens to subvert imperial ideology, and
the latter appropriates the rhetoric of spectacle to yoke petrification with
monumentalization.

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 Viewed panoptically, Playing Gods offers an embarrassment of riches to
the specialist Ovidian scholar and students of Roman culture more broadly.
It is brimming with fresh insights and dexterous connections, many of
which will generate further development in their own right (one such is
the creative exchange between Metamorphoses and Fasti, which Feldherr
persuasively shows to be braided in their textualization of Roman ritual).
Viewed microscopically, this book’s richness of detail and its commitment
to multiple outlooks sometimes obscure its focus, which gets slippery
and paratactic at points, replicating perhaps too closely the “inherently
prismatic” (346) nature of Feldherr’s subject. Overall, Feldherr succeeds
admirably in reanimating the multidimensional qualities of Ovid’s poem
as it participates in, and actively mediates, Roman social consciousness at
a time when change was not only a literary but a civic concern.

Jamie C. Fumo
McGill University

Robert David Stacey, ed. Re: Reading the Postmodern:

Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism.
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. 394 pp. $39.95.

Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Mod-
ernism is a collection of essays that emerged from the 2008 meeting of
the annual Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa,
organized and chaired by the collection’s editor, Robert David Stacey. At
this conference, scholars and writers were asked to think about Canadian
postmodernism, both in terms of how it has developed and where it has
gone. This book collects perspectives on postmodernism from pioneers
in the field, including Linda Hutcheon and Robert Kroetsch, as well as
writers like Christian Bök and academics such as Herb Wyile and Susan
Rudy. In short, this text offers a wide range of perspectives on postmod-
ernism, from those who question its value as a tool for analysis to those
who question Linda Hutcheon’s original definition of it, to those who
argue for its continued importance in the way we think and talk about
Canadian literature. In collecting together such a diversity of perspectives,
this text is significant for scholars of contemporary Canadian literature
and especially for graduate students who may not yet have been exposed
to the multiplicity of views about postmodernism in Canada.

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