Euripides and the Boundaries of the Human presents the first single-volume reading in nearly fifty years of all of Euripides’ surviving plays. Rather than examining one or a handful of dramas in monograph or article form, Mark Ringer insists on the thematic and stylistic parallels that unite a diverse canon of works. Euripides is often referred to as the most modern of the three Ancient Greek tragedians, but in what way can the work of this fifth-century B.C. artist be claimed as modern? The multi-layered presentation of character is new within the context of Athenian Tragedy. The plays also reveal equal concern with the preservation and re-vitalization of tradition, especially with respect to the portrayal of the Olympian gods. Euripidean drama upholds tradition just as vigorously as it posits a new kind of realism in character portrayal in the Ancient Theatre. Euripidean drama fuses what was old with what was new in order to revitalize and perpetuate the art of tragedy. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in the fields of classics, Greek drama in translation or in the original Greek, theater studies, comparative literature, tragedy, and religion.

Although Americans are no longer compelled to learn Greek and Latin, classical ideals remain embedded in American law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history and especially popular culture. In the Western genre, many film and television directors (such as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah) have drawn inspiration from antiquity, and the classical values and influences in their work have shaped our conceptions of the West for years. This thought-provoking, first-of-its-kind collection of essays celebrates, affirms and critiques the West's relationship with the classical world. Explored are films like Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, The Track of the Cat, Trooper Hook, The Furies, Heaven's Gate, and Slow West, as well as serials like Gunsmoke and Lonesome Dove.

Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.

The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.

"Becoming Female", the first book-length examination of the body in classical Athenian tragedy, reconsiders the figure of the male tragic hero, making use of both feminist and body theory. The male hero becomes female in the space of tragedy through the experience of suffering, and seems unable to return to any secure expression of masculinity. Katrina Cawthorn concentrates initially on the figure of Heracles in Sophocles' "The Women of Trachis", an exemplary specimen of the tragic process of becoming female, who exhibits many of the central issues considered in the book. The male hero is, in the course of the play, undone and feminised, while the instability of masculine identity is revealed.This theme of becoming female, and the resulting failure to circumscribe the feminine and return to any secure and triumphant concept of masculinity, is argued to be a discernible feature of the genre of tragedy. The inconclusive and disconcerting nature of tragic endings contribute to the dislocation of the tragic male and emphasise the Dionysian disturbance of the male hero.Moreover, this state of the dissolute male hero has textual and theatrical consequences, extending to affect the audience so that it too becomes feminised by the processes of tragedy."Becoming Female" is an important work for scholars and students of Classical Studies, Ancient History, Drama and Theatre Studies, Women's Studies and Cultural Studies.

Brill’s Companion to Euripides, as well as presenting a comprehensive and authoritative guide to understanding Euripides and his masterworks, provides scholars and students with compelling fresh perspectives upon a broad range of issues in the field of Euripidean studies.

This first in-depth account of Euripides' relationship with the visual arts demonstrates how frequently the tragedian used language to visual effect, whether through allusion or actual references to objects, motifs built around real or imaginary objects, or the use of technical terminology.

This Element follows the development of humans in constantly changing climates and environments from Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago, to fully modern humans who moved out of Africa to Europe and Asia 70,000 years ago. Biosemiotics reveals meaningful communication among coevolving members of the intricately connected life forms on this dynamic planet. Within this web hominins developed culture from bipedalism and meat-eating to the use of fire, stone tools, and clothing, allowing wide migrations and adaptations. Archaeology and ancient DNA analysis show how fully modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals and Denisovans before emerging as the sole survivors of the genus Homo 35,000 years ago. Their visions of the world appear in magnificent cave paintings and bone sculptures of animals, then more recently in written narratives like the Gilgamesh epic and Euripides' Bacchae whose images still haunt us with anxieties about human efforts to control the natural world.

This volume provides essays that represent a range of perspectives on women, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, tracing the debates from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle's definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright's involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.