The Pearson Education Library Collection offers you over 1200 fiction, nonfiction, classic, adapted classic, illustrated classic, short stories, biographies, special anthologies, atlases, visual dictionaries, history trade, animal, sports titles and more

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The series seeks to recover the entire extant corpus of Greek tragedy, quite as though the ancient tragedians wrote in the English of our own time. Under the editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each of these volumes includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays. This finely-tuned translation of Sophocles' Antigone by Richard Emil Braun, both a distinguished poet and a professional scholar-critic, offers, in lean, sinewy verse and lyrics of unusual intensity, an interpretation informed by exemplary scholarship and critical insight. Braun presents an Antigone not marred by excessive sentimentality or pietistic attitudes. His translation underscores the extraordinary structural symmetry and beauty of Sophocles' design by focusing on the balanced and harmonious view of tragically opposed wills that makes the play so moving. Unlike the traditionally gentle and pious protagonist opposed to a brutal and villainous Creon, Braun's Antigone emerges as a true Sophoclean heroine--with all the harshness and even hubris, as well as pathos and beauty, that Sophoclean heroism requires. Braun also reveals a Creon as stubbornly "principled" as Antigone, instead of simply the arrogant tyrant of conventional interpretations.

Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history. In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.

Now there's a girl who understands things, the crow thought. When two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, die in a vicious battle over the crown of Thebes, the new ruler, King Creon, decides that Eteocles will be buried as a hero, while Polynices will be left outside as a feast for the dogs and crows. But the young Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, will defy the cruel tyrant and attempt to give her brother the burial he deserves. This simple act of love and bravery will set in motion a terrible course of events that will reverberate across the entire kingdom... Dave Eggers says, of the series: "I couldn't be prouder to be a part of it. Ever since Alessandro conceived this idea I thought it was brilliant. The editions that they've complied have been lushly illustrated and elegantly designed."

Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Antigone's obsession with the dead, Creon's crushing inflexibility, Deianeira's jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra's obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination... Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or silence: they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of music and poetry. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation.

Antigone is Sophocles' masterpiece, a seminal influence on a wide range of theatrical, literary, and intellectual traditions. This volume sets the play in the contexts of its mythical background, its performance, its relation to contemporary culture and thought, and its rich reception history. But its main aim is to encourage first-hand engagement with the complexities of interpretation that make the play so enduringly thought-provoking and rewarding. Though Creon's actions prove disastrous and Antigone's are vindicated, the Antigone is no simple study in the excesses of tyranny or the virtues of heroic resistance, but a more nuanced exploration of conflicting views of right and wrong and of the conditions that constrain human beings' efforts to control their destinies and secure their happiness. The book's chapters consider the extent of the original audience's acquaintance with earlier versions of the legends of Antigone's family, the structure of the plot as it unfolds in theatrical performance, the presentation of the characters and the motivations that drive them, the major political, social, and ethical themes that the play raises, and the resonance of those themes in the ways that the play has been interpreted, adapted, performed, and appropriated in later periods.

King Oedipus/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone Three towering works of Greek tragedy depicting the inexorable downfall of a doomed royal dynasty The legends surrounding the house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create this powerful trilogy about humanity's struggle against fate. King Oedipus is the devastating portrayal of a ruler who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realize he has committed and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. Oedipus at Colonus provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while Antigone depicts the fall of the next generation, through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident of his own authority. Translated with an Introduction by E. F. WATLING

When her dead brother is decreed a traitor, his body left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone refuses to accept this most severe of punishments. Defying her uncle who governs, she dares to say ‘No’. Forging ahead with a funeral alone, she places personal allegiance before politics, a tenacious act that will trigger a cycle of destruction. Renowned for the revelatory nature of his work, Ivo van Hove first enthralled London audiences with his ground-breaking Roman Tragediesseen at the Barbican in 2009. Drawing on his 'ability to break open texts calcified by tradition' (Guardian), the director now turns to a classic Greek masterpiece.

A text of and commentary on Sophocles' tragedy Antigone.

"To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother. So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took him to his master, the King of Corinth. Polybus being childless adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god and heard himself the word declared before to Laius." -Preface