Originally published in 1985. This investigation of Ovid’s fable takes a different tack to previous studies of the love lyric or the themes but looks at the creation of narrative strategies to explain Narcissus’ experience. The story has always been understood as literally impossible but invites readers to ask what is meant by the puzzling tale of deception and death.

The limits placed on the fable by the commentaries of the medieval period allow us to appreciate the narrative expansion of the fable in twelfth and thirteenth-century poetry. Themes in this book are the way the...