Angry Maternity in Early Modern English Ovidianism

This essay argues that early modern Ovidianism offers a rich discourse for tracing the history of emotions and focuses on the ways Ovid's Metamorphoses represents Hecuba's revenge and metamorphosis as a narrative of maternal anger reflecting individual and collective suffering. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's approach to reading literary history as a key to understanding biocultural emotional formations, this essay suggests that references to and adaptations of this particular myth can be considered entries in an archive of maternal anger and its political consequences that extends from Ovid's Metamorphoses to the present.