Euripides and the Tragic Tradition asks all the right questions. It forces us to confront the many contradictions in Euripides' work, demonstrates the differences between the literary assumptions of Sophocles and Euripides, and challenges us to respond to Euripidean drama with sophistication and sensitivity. --Francis M. Dunn, Scholia.

This book contains essays by international experts on Sophocles, asking why he matters, and why he is still read and performed today. His seven surviving tragedies are discussed from a variety of perspectives. A picture emerges of Sophocles' place at the foundations of the tragic tradition and in its perpetual refashioning and renewal.

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.

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.

This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.

In this valuable book, Hanna M. Roisman provides a uniquely comprehensive look at Euripides' Hippolytus. Roisman begins with an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suggests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for the Athenian audience's reservations about his Hippolytus Veiled. She proceeds to analyze significant scenes in the play, including Hippolytus' prayer to Artemis, Phaedra's delirium, Phaedra's "confession" speech, and the interactions between Theseus and Hippolytus. Concluding with a discussion of the meaning of the tragic in Hippolytus, Roisman questions the applicability in this case of the idea of the tragic flaw. Nothing Is as It Seems includes extensive comparisons of Euripides' play with the Phaedra of Seneca. This is a very important book for students and scholars of Greek tragedy, literature, and rhetoric.

"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.

What happened to Greek tragedy after the death of Euripides? This book provides some answers, and a broad historical overview.

An exploration of the poetic qualities of the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides highlighting their similarities and differences.

Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect, providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as material “affect,” an intense flow of energies between bodies, animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the physicality of Greek tragedy.