Ovids Heroides 18-21

1 Do women find a distinctive voice in the Heroides?

Think about women and the history of letter-writing. In this connection, note Byblis
letter writing activity in the Metamorphoses (9.450-665)
Supplementary bibliography
Toril Moi Sexual / Textual Politics (London 1985)
Julia Kristeva Stabat Mater and Womens Time in the Kristeva Reader (Oxford,
1986) ed. Toril Moi, 160-86, 187-213
Lucie Irigaray This sex which is not one (Ithaca, NY, 1985), tr. C. Porter
D. Lodge Modern Criticism and Theory (London and New York, 1988), section on
Feminism
Helene Cixous Coming to Writing and other Essays ed. D. Jenson (Harvard 1991)
Ed. H. Wilcox, K. McWatters, A. Thompson, L. R. Williams The Body and the Text:
Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching (New York, London, 1990)
R. Perry Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York, 1980)
J. Snyder The Web of the Song CJ 76 (1981) 193-6
P. Rosenmeier The Epistolary Novel in Greek Fiction. The Greek Novel in Context,
edd. J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman (London, 1994) 146-65
J. Culler Reading as a woman in On Deconstruction: Theory and criticism after
structuralism (Ithaca, 1983) 43-64
2 Do the Heroides read well as letters?
On the appropriate style for letters, cf. Demetrius On Style 223-35
Supplementary Bibliography
E. P. Morris The Form of the Epistle in Horace YCS 2 (1931) 81-114
J. Farrell Reading and Writing the Heroides HSCP 98 (1998) 307-38
R. Alden Smith Fantasy, Myth, and Love Letters: Text and Tale in Ovids Heroides
Arethusa 27 (1994) 247-73
D. F. Kennedy The Epistolary Mode and the First of Ovids Heroides CQ 34 (1984)
413-22
A. Barchiesi Future reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovids Heroides HSCP
95 (1993) 233-65
3 Women have the last word in the double Epistles. How significant is it that the
letters of the two female characters in Heroides 18-21 are replies to the writings of
men?
General supplementary bibliography
P. Hardie Ovids Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002), ch 4 The Heroides, pp. 10642.
P. A. Rosenmeyer Love letters in Callimachus, Ovid and Aristaenetus, Or the sad fate
of a mailorder bride, MD 36 (1996): 9-31.
____ Ovids Heroides and Tristia: voices from exile, Ramus 26: 29-56.
Read Musaeus Hero and Leander (Callimachus Loeb) (5th cet. AD poet) and the
Acontius and Cydippe story in Callimachus Aetia book 3.