Professor Mandy Green

Professor

Affiliations
Affiliation	Telephone
Professor in the Department of English Studies	+44 (0) 191 33 42567
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Biography

Mandy Green was a student at Durham where she read English and Latin, Joint Honours, and continued at Durham for her postgraduate studies. Her research interests centre on classical presences in English literature with a particular focus on Ovid and Milton.

Her monograph, Milton’s Ovidian Eve, looks at the ways in which Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses – not least Ovid’s own central metaphor of continuous transformation – to create a subtly evolving portrait of the first woman, Eve.The book proceeds by a series of unfolding explorations of Eve, examining her alignment with a range of mythological figures from a number of different vantage points. These metamorphic moments, when one mythological figuration effortlessly melts into another, generate an exciting sense of dynamic provisionality about Eve; they become a way of enacting or expressing subtly shifting states of mind and feeling, imparting a sense of psychological depth and authenticity to her responses, which are always in process, moment by moment, rather than fixed and formulated from the outset. Paradise Lost’s complex interplay with the Metamorphoses affects a reading of crucial, defining moments in the narrative and challenges preconditioned responses to the poem, which have derived from easy suppositions about Milton’s attitude to women, pagan mythology and Ovid himself. This study stands at the intersection of a number of seventeenth century cultural contexts and discourses, most notably, gender relations and intertextuality.

Mandy Green is a member of the Centre for the Study of the Classical Tradition, the Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures and the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Durham. She is also a member of the British Milton Seminar and reviews titles for the Modern Language Review, Milton Quarterly, Classical Review and the Review of English Studies. She acts as a referee for Milton Studies and is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of the Arts in Society.

Dr Green has supervised research on seventeenth-century drama, poetry and translations, and would welcome students with research interests in early modern English literature and comparative literature.

Cover of Virgil Aeneid Cover of Milton's Ovidian Eve