'A playful book, brimming with merriment in its stories and curiosities .' Kate Cooper, The Times Literary Supplement
1. Forms of attention: time and narrative in Ecphrasis; 2. When size matters: erotics, the epyllion, and Colluthus' Rape of Helen; 3. In the beginning; 4. Preposterous poetics and the erotics of death; 5. Strange dogs: Joseph and Aseneth and the dynamics of transformation; 6. Life forms: biography and rabbinical writing coda; Acknowledgements; Bibliography. Index.