The impact of Ovid's Metamorphoses on our culture can hardly be overestimated. The poem is one of the most exciting and accessible classical texts, our key source for nearly all the famous myths of Greece and Rome. Sarah Annes Brown offers a lively, and sometimes provocative, introduction to the Metamorphoses, exploring the impact of recent critical developments and tracing its rich afterlife in both high and popular culture. The book's later chapters are devoted to five of the most memorable Ovidian stories - Apollo and Daphne, Actaeon, Philomela, Arachne and Pygmalion. Each subtle and elusive story is found to have generated a huge range of creative responses. The influence of the Pygmalion myth, for example, can be traced in Frankenstein, Vertigo and Blade Runner, as well as in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Sarah Annes Brown is Director of Studies in English and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (1999), published by Duckworth.