Abstract EN:

The present PhD deals with the reception of Ovid's works in the second half of the seventeenth century. The emphasis is laid on the transition from a humanist and learned interpretation, favouring Ovid's motifs, to a critical interpretation, taking into account the poet's aesthetic sense. The gradually emerging awareness of Ovidian poetics found its expression in a new editorial status, which left aside the former pre-eminence given to the Metamorphoses and embraced Ovid's whole works, with a particular emphasis on his amorous poetry. The traditional allegorical reading of Ovid's works was progressively superseded by an assessment involving taste, with a major interest in Ovid's expression of passions. He was thus considered a gallant poet, taken as a model by modern gallantry. Indeed, poets belonging to minor gallant genres drew their inspiration from Ovid's erotic works; Benserade sought to instil a gallant form into the fable genre when he wrote his collection of poems Métamorphoses en rondeaux; finally La Fontaine appropriated the Ovidian aesthetics through copying the poet's style, more than borrowing a set of motifs. The interest displayed for Ovid's passionate lines also sparked off the rebirth of elegy, at the same time as it soon bent it towards lamentation. This new Heroïde-influenced elegiacs then crossed genre boundaries and laid the poetic basis of amorous epistles written in prose, on the pattern of the Lettres portugaises. They also were the basis for the pathetic ingredient of tragedy as conceived by Racine. The gallant and elegiac Ovidian poetics thus followed the many aesthetic variations of tender feelings in the seventeenth century.