Pavese’s Dialogue with Ovid. The Destiny of Metamorphosis in ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’ (1947)

Intertextual relations between Cesare Pavese’s literary oeuvre and Latin literature are far less visibile than Greek intertexts, yet works from major Roman authors such as Virgil and Ovid have played an important role in several of Pavese’s works, and the role of the Metamorphoses in Dialoghi con Leucò is a case in point. This contribution attempts to read Pavese’s collection of mythological dialogues through the looking-glass of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, assessing in particular the ways in which broader macrostructural perspectives, such as the arranging of separate episodes in an overarching narrative structure and the use of linking devices connecting single stories, intersect with the different elaborations of metamorphic motifs.status: publishe