This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.
Euripides' Medea is one of the most often read, studied and performed of all Greek tragedies. A searingly cruel story of a woman's brutal revenge on a husband who has rejected her for a younger and richer bride, it is unusual among Greek dramas for its acute portrayal of female psychology. Medea can appear at once timeless and strikingly modern. Yet, the play is very much a product of the political and social world of fifth century Athens and an understanding of its original context, as well as a consideration of the responses of later ages, is crucial to appreciating this work and its legacy. This collection of essays by leading academics addresses these issues, exploring key themes such as revenge, character, mythology, the end of the play, the chorus and Medea's role as a witch. Other essays look at the play's context, religious connotations, stagecraft and reception. The essays are accompanied by David Stuttard's English translation of the play, which is performer-friendly, accessible yet accurate and closely faithful to the original.
Tragic Workings in Euripides? Drama' offers a substantially new theory and method for understanding Attic tragedy. Starting from anthropological insights, and drawing on Aristotle?s theory of the specific ?tragic? reactions of ?shock and horror? as well as his propositions on the ?tragic? violation of fundamental social values, Des Bouvrie argues that the participating community in fifth-century Greece, for instance at the Dionysia, the Athenian dramatic festival, assembled as a collective body engaging in a program of ?prescribed sentiments.? She identifies this program as a ?tragic process? that mobilized the audience into revitalizing their institutional order, the unquestionable values sustaining the oikos and preserving the polis.00Des Bouvrie?s novel, not to say revolutionary, and explicitly ?anthropological? approach, consists in focusing primarily on the ?tragic workings? of Attic tragedy. While Euripides is singled out ? with astute readings of Heracleidae, Andromache, Hecuba, Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Tauris and Iphigenia at Aulis on offer - the author?s earlier work on other Greek tragedians suggests that these features were operating in the genre as such. For students and scholars interested in ancient Greek tragedy, this volume constitutes a remarkable contribution. It will significantly further studies of the tragic genre as well as stimulate new debate.
Euripides' interest in the psychology and social position of women is well known. Of the great Greek playwrights, he most directly reflects contemporary philosophical and social debates, and his work is of great value as a source for social history. The important new studies in this volume explore Euripides' treatment of sexuality and Greek ideals of women's behaviour. Using a wide range of analytic techniques, seven scholars direct new light not only on Euripides' own views of women but also on the ideals and preoccupations of his contemporaries in this area. Athenian women of the classical period were used, in Plato's phrase, 'to a life in the shadows'. This book helps us to see how far the influence of these cloistered women extended into the sunlit world of men.
The figure of Medea has inspired artists in all fields throughout the centuries. This work examines the major representations of Medea in myth, art, and ancient and contemporary literature, as well as the philosophical, psychological and cultural questions these portrayals raise.
This volume is arguably one of the most important studies of Euripides to appear in the last decade. Not only does it offer incisive examinations of many of Euripides' extant plays and their influence, it also includes seminal examinations of a number of Euripides fragmentary plays. This approach represents a novel and exciting development in Euripidean studies, since it is only very recently that the fragmentary plays have begun to appear in reliable and readily accessible editions. The book s thirty-two contributors constitute an international "who s who" of Euripidean studies and Athenian drama, and their contributions will certainly feature in the forefront of scholarly discourse on Euripides and Greek drama for years to come.
It is a commonly held view among historians of Greek literature that with the advent of Euripides the tragic structure, even the tragic outlook of Greek drama suffered a breakdown from which it never recovered. While there is much truth in this opinion, it has tended to put too much emphasis on "Euripides the destroyer" rather than "Euripides the creator." In this study the author's main purpose is to redress the balance and to discuss the structure and techniques of Euripidean drama in relation to its new and richly varied themes. The consistent dramatic form evolved by Aeschylus and Sophocles had grown out of their conception of tragedy as the resultant of the tension between the individual will and the universal order suggested in myth. For Euripides, who never fully accepted myth as the real basis of tragedy, alternate ways of using the traditional material became necessary, and the playwright continually changed his dramatic structure to suit the particular tragic idea he was seeking to express. Viewed in this way, Euripides' dramatic technique may be seen in positive as well as negative terms—as something other than the breakdown of structural technique and mythological insight under the overwhelming force of his ideas. Professor Conacher offers here a new view of Euripides as the first Greek dramatist properly to understand the world of myth, and so, in a sense, to stand a bit outside it. He shows how Euripides, far from being an impatient or incompetent craftsman, used traditional mth as a basis for inventing new forms in which to cast his perceptions of the sources of human tragedy. All the extant Euripidean drama is examined in this book; the result is an intelligent guide to the plays for all students of dramatic literature, as well as a convincing defence of Euripides the creator.
This volume evaluates a single element of tragic art, namely the way in which narrative descriptions of place participate in the poetry of tragedy. They join together structures of the theater to create a context for tragic performance, and ultimately reflect upon tragedy's connection to earlier narrative forms and to the traditional tales that regularly supply tragic plots. The first part of this book examines the introductory function of spatial descriptions and the peculiar resources offered to the playwright by cult settings. In the second part, the spatial oppositions, that are inherent structuring devices in traditional tales, are taken up in chapters treating the motif of exile in extant tragedy.
Euripides' "Suppliant Women" is an unfairly neglected master work by the most controversial of the three great tragedians of Ancient Greece. It dramatises the story of one of the proudest moments in Athenian mythical history: the intervention of Theseus in support of international law to force the burial of the Argives who were killed during their attack on Thebes. But Euripides adds new characters to the story and presents the myth in a different and sometimes ambiguous light. A sense of uncertainty and undercutting pervades this play, which dramatises the sufferings of the innocent in war and then at the end foretells more war. As well as presenting a scene-by-scene analysis, this book will discuss the date and background of the play, whether people and events from contemporary Athens can be glimpsed in the drama; the problems of staging, and finally the story in later tradition.
