Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche Since 1650

The story of Cupid and Psyche is first known through the Latin novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the second-century AD writer Apuleius--one of the few Latin fictions from Roman antiquity to have survived in its entirety. Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche since 1650 examines the reception of the long two-book romantic story of Cupid and Psyche in European literature from 1650 to the present day, with some attention also devoted to fine art and opera across this period.

Stephen Harrison and Regine May argue that Cupid and Psyche had a broad and profound influence on certain important and specific areas of European culture; it was appropriated and adapted to suit particular cultural and generic contexts, especially the development of the fairy tale. This constitutes an important strand of the more general reception of the ancient novel, since the tale of Cupid and Psyche is arguably the most famous section of any fiction from Greece or Rome.

Apuleius’ story has enjoyed an extraordinarily rich reception throughout the five centuries from its rediscovery in the Renaissance to the present day. Previous studies of this reception have focused on the tale’s prominence in Renaissance art and literature, or otherwise on its status in the German Romantic period. This book goes further and wider, ranging across literary genres in English, French, German and Dutch, encompassing poetry and drama as well as prose fiction, and covering all the key elements of the tale’s reception from 1650 to the present. We hereby rediscover a tale that today remains as relevant and ripe for appropriation as ever.

Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature and Senior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Regine May, Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature, University of Leeds

Stephen Harrison is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, where he has studied and worked since 1987. He has held visiting positions at Rome, Siena, Bergen, Copenhagen, Princeton IAS, Stanford, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, Dunedin, and Christchurch, and holds such posts currently at Trondheim and Stellenbosch. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Accademia Vergiliana di Mantova, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Regine May is Associate Professor in Latin Language and Literature at the University of Leeds, where she has worked since 2006, after previously holding positions at the Universities of Oxford and Merton College (2004-6), Durham (2003-4), and Manchester (2001-3). Her DPhil from Oxford on Apuleius and Drama (2002) was supervised by Stephen Harrison and Peter G. McC Brown.