School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemDistaff Displacement: Narratives of Female Exile in Ovidian Poetry( 2022)Displacement is a torment experienced by numerous women in Ovid’s Heroides and Fasti. Reading these episodes from a gendered perspective reveals nuances in the female vs. male experience of exile, broadening understanding of how exile is experienced by women and its impact on their psychology, agency, and identity. These episodes explore the myriad of factors that can influence a woman’s success or failure in finding refuge, and how gender and exile intersect to create an oppressive cycle of dual-marginalisation. The increased vulnerability of exiled women provides a powerful model for Ovid to voice his own experience of displacement in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Thematic and linguistic echoes link his pre- and post-exilic work, bridging poetic fact and fiction to identify the poet with his characters through the shared experience of social exclusion and persecution by a more dominant, masculine force.
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ItemVirgil’s Aeneid: a world of labyrinths( 2017)The role of the labyrinth in Virgil’s Aeneid is often overlooked, and, I argue, has never before been fully appreciated. In fact, the geometry of the labyrinth symbol and its mythic background not only shape the narrative action and motivations of the characters, but also lend literary and mythic context that enrich the symbolism and social commentary of the poem. The labyrinth motif provides a unifying backdrop to specific moral and philosophical concerns at the time of Virgil in Augustan Rome. The aim of this thesis is to offer a new way of reading the Aeneid. It establishes the importance of the labyrinth to the text and systematically demonstrates the centrality of the labyrinth symbolism to the original and holistic worldview presented in the Aeneid. In this reading of the poem, Virgil’s concepts of space and time emerge as fractal iterations of the labyrinth’s geometric form. This work begins in Chapter One with an overview of the labyrinth in archaeology and literature up to the time of Virgil. A detailed understanding of this background is essential to recognition of the full significance of the labyrinth to the Aeneid. Chapters Two, Three and Four use the scaffolding of Chapter One to investigate the wider application of the metaphor of the labyrinth throughout the poem. Reading the Aeneid in this light yields a new framework for understanding Aeneas’ heroic journey and may further reveal the true nature of the poem’s trajectory concerning the future of Rome.