Apocalypse Now? Kate Atkinson Reads Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

Kate Atkinson’s short story collection, Not the End of the World (2002), has typically puzzled reviewers, unsure of its goals and hesitant about its success. This essay offers an alternative, by reading the collection through the lens of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Atkinson clearly signals her debt to Ovid in several epigraphs, but the overall impression left with readers who know Ovid only as a repository of classical myth has caused Atkinson’s remarkably inventive reception of Ovidian poetics to be misread. Atkinson uses the Latin poet’s interest in change and its often strange permutations as a way of interrogating contemporary concerns about consumerism, environmental degradation, and cultural forgetfulness, against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic fantasy. The result is both a new appreciation for Atkinson’s brilliance and a fresh approach to Ovid’s transformative masterpiece.

Keywords

• Ovid
• Metamorphoses
• Kate Atkinson
• apocalypse/apocalyptic
• Pythagoreanism
• environment