'Ovid's presence at the centre of the Latin canon must now be beyond doubt. A supple understanding of allusion, a post-modern interest in the phenomenon of textuality, and the revival of psychoanalytic criticism have all replaced the puerile genre wrecker who single-handedly brought down the Augustan golden age with a poet uniquely responsive to contemporary literary sensibility. This re-location of Ovid from the end of the classical tradition to the beginning of our own receives its most comprehensive and stimulating confirmation in Philip Hardie's ambitious new book. H. reveals the dynamic of absent presences as a defining poetic interest throughout Ovid's career. From the 'Amores' to the exile poetry, Ovid simultaneously celebrates the text's capacity to project the figures it describes, and the author who produces it, into the immediate experience of its readers and exposes these presences as mere illusions that mark above all the distance between representation and reality. This focus yields a new and strikingly coherent overview of the entire corpus (...) with the 'Amores' very much at its 'heart', and fires a broader argument about literary history. For H. wants not just to make the now common point about post-modern critical concerns unlocking Ovid's texts. Rather he suggests that Ovid above all stands at the head of a tradition of exploring the limits of illusionism from antiquity to the present. (...) Every reader will find points of disagreement with individual analyses, but few will deny the value of reading the text in H.'s terms, or of the connections within the corpus suggested by them. (...) These reflections in no way detract from the importance of this book, which should be in the hands not only of anyone interested in Ovid, but of anyone interested in ancient, or modern, poetics as well.' (ANDREW FELDHERR in The Journal of Roman Studies, 2003, pp.373-74). From the library of Prof. Carl Deroux.