In this study, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Through the exploration of a range of canonical and marginal texts, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to women's embroideries of Ovidian myths, Oakley-Brown argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.

Liz Oakley-Brown is Lecturer in Renaissance Writing at Lancaster University, UK

Contents: Introduction: translation and transformation; Titus Andronicus and the sexual politics of translation; The heterotopic place of translation: The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch. Entituled, Amintas Dale; Violence in translation: George Sandys's Metamorphosis Englished; From Sandys's Ghost to Samuel Garth: Ovid's Metamorphoses in early 18th-century England; In Arachne's trace: women as translators of the Metamorphoses; The curious case of Caxton's Ovid; Epilogue: translation and fragmentation; Bibliography; Index.