Alison’s text resounds with intertextual echoes, images and leitmotifs of Ovidian poetry, which become all the more significant when interpreted in view of the poet’s exile. Either through direct descriptions of the poet’s mishaps at Tomis or through constant proleptic interruptions to the narrative, exile casts its harrowing shadow over the story and haunts the whole book. Or maybe not? This paper investigates the many ways in which exile is introduced to and is further entangled within the wider narrative of the book. However, the space in between seems to diverge significantly from what would be a conventional narrative about the poet’s tormented time in the cold and hostile environment of the Black Sea. Exile frames the whole book, which opens with Ovid’s dramatic moments during his forced overnight expulsion from Rome and comes to an end with the poet’s solitary figure on a desolate beach at Tomis. Alison’s story placed between life and art, reality and dream, Rome and Tomis, civilization and the wild offers a dense and rich portrayal of Ovid both as love artist and as a poet in exile.

Jane Alison’s first book The Love-Artist, a novel about Ovid’s exile, appeared at the dawn of the second millennium (published in 2001), almost a millennium after Ovid’s exile to Tomis.

The love artist jane alison