Society of Classical Studies 156th Annual Meeting
JANUARY 2-5, 2025
PHILADELPHIA
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the International Ovidian Society
THE HEROIDES AND THEIR TRADITION
Organized by Daniel Libatique (Fairfield University) and Alicia Matz (Boston University)
nunc oculos tua cum violarit epistula nostros,
non rescribendi gloria visa levis.
(Ovid Heroides 17.3-4)
Now that your letter has violated my eyes,
the honor of writing back seems not trifling.
The last few decades have seen an explosion of modern stories that treat ancient Greco-Roman narratives from the points of view of marginalized identities, from Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad to Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls to Madeline Miller's Circe, amongst many other examples. The power of the female perspective in adaptations or reimaginings of mythical narratives is not, however, a modern phenomenon. Ovid in his Heroides draws on a rich tradition of wronged heroines and gives direct voice to their anger, anxieties, and despair in poetic epistles, full of emotions that were patriarchally suppressed or silenced in favor of male heroes in mythological predecessors.
The Heroides embody a nexus of complicated yet rich contradictions and provide many opportunities for exploration. The female perspective in the Heroides is authored by a man ventriloquizing female characters. The epistolary form suggests a recipient, and yet the poems are written as if the only readers will be the literary audience and the other writers of the letters (Fulkerson 2005). The settings and characters of the poems are removed in time and space from Augustan Rome, but contemporary tensions around social, cultural, and political upheaval cannot help but find their way into even Ovid's earliest works (Drinkwater 2022). These tensions and contradictions are ripe for scholarly exploration.
For this reason, the International Ovidian Society invites papers on the Heroides and their tradition for our panel at the 2025 SCS Annual Meeting. While it is undeniable that works like the Metamorphoses have dominated Ovidian scholarship, scholarly activity on the Heroides has seen an uptick in recent years: a search for "Heroides" on L'Année Philologique shows 25 articles and chapters focusing on or treating the Heroides published in just the last four years (since 2020). Our hope is that the papers of this panel will contribute to this trend by exploring and unraveling some of the complexities of Ovid's Heroides and illustrating how they are fruitful material for (re-)examination from fresh angles and perspectives.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- The Heroides as reception of mythic traditions
- Epistolarity and its relationship to gender
- Politics and socio-cultural concerns in the Heroides
- Intertexts and allusions within the Heroides
- The place of the Heroides in the elegiac tradition
- The place of the Heroides in Ovid's canon
- The Heroides' engagement with other poems of Ovid
- Artistic receptions of the Heroides
- Literary receptions of the Heroides
- Masculine ventriloquism of feminine characters
- Modern Heroides
- Intertextual connections between the Heroides and their literary predecessors (e.g., the Iliad or the Odyssey)
- Translation as interpretation of the Heroides
Direct any questions to the organizers, Alicia Matz (amatz@bu.edu) and Daniel Libatique (dlibatique@fairfield.edu).
Please submit your abstract for a 20-minute paper using this Google Form by Friday, March 1, 2024, at 5pm Eastern. The text of the abstract should not mention the name of the author. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words (excluding bibliography); follow the SCS guidelines for individual abstracts. The organizers will review all submissions anonymously, and their decision will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by mid to late March 2024, with enough time that those whose abstracts are not chosen can participate in the individual abstract submission process for the upcoming SCS meeting.
Bibliography
Drinkwater, Megan O. 2022. Ovid's Heroides and the Augustan Principate. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fulkerson, Laurel. 2005. The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.