Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England

"In Ovid and the Politics of Emotions in Elizabethan England, Fox provides a serious and suggestive reading of the literary history of the emotions - chiefly grief - in late Elizabethan England. By turning to the specifically literary texts through which Elizabethan court poets mediated and meditated on grief, Fox argues for a more flexible model of grieving than scholars have typically associated with mourning and melancholia: she finds agency where psychoanalytic and new historicist critics have characteristically found constraints. In this project, Fox pays close attention to Elizabethan adaptations of Ovid s Metamorphoses, which allows for both the engagement of the passions and escape from their paralyzing effects." - Heather James, Departments of English and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California"An excellent book on a subject that is crucial to modern critical theory in the wake of deconstruction, new historicism, and gender studies; a brilliant examination of Ovid and his relation to gender studies. Fox s Ovidian reading of Titus is the most brilliant reading of that underestimated play . . . Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England belongs in that select group of books dealing with Renaissance literature and classical authors like Leonard Barkan and Jonathan Bate." - Thomas P. Roche, Professor of English, Princeton University