Madness is central to Western tragedy in all epochs, but we find the origins of this centrality in early Greece: in Homeric insight into the "damage a damaged mind can do." Greece, and especially tragedy, gave the West its permanent perception of madness as violent and damaging. Drawing on her deep knowledge of anthropology, psychoanalysis, Shakespeare, and the history of madness, as well as of Greek language and literature, Ruth Padel probes the Greek language of madness, which is fundamental to tragedy: translating, making it reader-friendly to nonspecialists, and showing how Greek images continued through medieval and Renaissance societies into a "rough tragic grammar" of madness in the modern period.
- ISBN10 0691033609
- ISBN13 9780691033600
- Publish Date 29 January 1995
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 October 2001
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 294
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5651.html