Paula James

Kicking the Habit:the Significance of Consuetudo in interpreting the Fable of Cupid and Psyche

Looks at the way Apuleius uses abstract concepts as personifications in his novel METAMORPHOSES/ GOLDEN ASS and the function of them in relation to the myth of Cupid and Psyche as concepts.

Statues, Synths, and Simulacra: The Ovidian Contours of Screen Pygmalions

This chapter critiques the persistence of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth in screen narratives of the creation of the ideal woman. Sculptor and statue have found everlasting life in stories about the challenge of shaping unpromising raw material into a culturally determined notion of female beauty. In the new millennium television and cinema continue to resonate with Ovidian themes and tropes. James discusses the ethics and aesthetics of designing artificial life in science and technology, especially the advent of the robotic sex slave. She argues that a classical text can be enriched by and contribute to our experience of the fiction and facts about cyborgs, CGI-generated personae, and biologically engineered creatures, including our desire to extend and adapt ourselves with mechanical parts and alien substances.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

In this chapter I explore aspects of baneful women, fallible men, and the mutual manipulation involved in gift giving with the Prometheus paradigm in mind. Elements within the myths of Pandora and Prometheus will be brought into constant interplay to enrich an appreciation of Robert Aldrich’s movie, but also to rethink the attributes of these mythical figures in their classical context. A. I. Bezzerides produced a culturally allusive screenplay that by the film’s finale was directly invoking classical and biblical characters, particularly the direct reference to a destructive Pandora about to unleash a monstrous power (spoiler warning!), as curious and acquisitive Gabrielle embraces and then opens the atomic box at the end of the film.1

How Classical is Ariadne's Parrot? Southall's Painting and Its Literary Registers

In this article I suggest ways in which a gorgeously crafted, colourful, compelling 20th century painting of an abandoned Ariadne highlights both her tragic and comic presence in classical literary representations. Joseph Southalls 1925-6 work Ariadne in Naxos (tempera on linen, 83.5 x 101.6 cm), can be viewed in all its glory in the Birmingham City Art Gallery (bequeathed by the artists widow, Anne Elizabeth, in 1948) but it was featured to fine effect in the 2007 exhibition The Parrot in Art: From D rer to Elizabeth Butterworth, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. It was in this psittacine (psittaceous?) context that I first encountered Ariadnes parrot so the bird perhaps loomed larger in the painting than it might as a stand-alone Southall on its home ground in the Gallery. The very presence of the parrot in this painting suggests a symbolic array to those familiar with Ariadnes mythical traditions and simultaneously attuned to the possibilities of the parrot as a trickster in both visual and written texts. Southalls painting with its foregrounding of the parrot functions as a mnemonic for Ariadnes portrayal in the poetry of Catullus and Ovid. For this reason, Southalls painting would provide stimulating seminar material, being both a visual feast and a discussion point for Ariadnes literary registers.