Hélène VialLa métamorphose dans les Métamorphoses d'Ovide : Étude sur l'art de la variation

Like the non omnibus una facies, non diuersa tamen from Néréides (Mét., II, 13-14), the poetic writing of the passages consecrated by Ovid to metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses is characterized by a subtle balance between similarities and dissimilarities: what seems to be always the same story (that of the miracle of the transformation of the bodies, a unique and total subject announced from the first verses and vertiginously declined to the final uiuam) is never the same, however, so much the art of variation deploys resources, transforming each new evocation of mutata forma into an experience of writing and reading absolutely singular.

It is on these two twin poetic realities, metamorphosis and variatio, that the present study focuses, at the same time to describe the respective springs, to define the nature of the organic link which, In the course of the verses, the relationship between this alliance and the Ovidian conception of writing is established.