This fascinating introduction to the comedy of Menander is the work of two classical scholars, both of whom have worked extensively as theatre practitioners. This is the first book to consider the plays of Menander primarily as performance pieces and to uncover the dramatic technique of this widely admired comic writer, whose plays had all but disappeared until the 1950s. Looking at the theatrical context of Menandrian comedy in its widest sense, the book includes discussions of recent productio...
City of Suppliants (Ashley and Peter Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture)
by Angeliki Tzanetou
After fending off Persia in the fifth century BCE, Athens assumed a leadership position in the Aegean world. Initially it led the Delian League, a military alliance against the Persians, but eventually the league evolved into an empire with Athens in control and exacting tribute from its former allies. Athenians justified this subjection of their allies by emphasizing their fairness and benevolence towards them, which gave Athens the moral right to lead. But Athenians also believed that the stro...
Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a lan...
Bernard Shaw and the Comic Sublime
by David J Gordon and Liss Kerstin Sylven
This book discovers in the imaginative life of the Shavian "oeuvre" a mythology of self, of which the political and social themes are aspects. Understanding "the sublime" as the modes of self-transcedence sought by an authorial will and "comic" as the resistances to these, Gordon shows how their interaction creates characteristic dramatic effects. In his style of analysis, genres like romance and comedy become psychological acts as well as conventional forms. In a theoretical first chapter, the...
Women in Greek epic are treated as objects, as commodities to be exchanged in marriage or as the spoils of warfare. However, women in Homeric epic also use objects to negotiate their own agency, subverting the male viewpoint by utilizing on their own terms the very form they themselves are thought by men to embody. Such female objects can transcend their physical limitations and be both symbolically significant and powerfully characterizing. They can be tools of recognition and identification. T...
She spoke in a tongue dead a thousand years, and she had no memory of the man she faced. Yet he had held her tightly but a few short years before, had sworn eternal vengeance-when she died in his arms from an assassin's wounds.
Debating with the Eumenides
Modern Greek national and cultural identities consist, to a considerable extent, of clusters of cultural memory, shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the classical past. Within this dialogue between modern Greece and classical antiquity, Greek tragedy takes pride of place. In this volume, ten scholars from Cyprus, Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States explore the various ways in which Greek tragedy and tragic myth have been reimagined and rewritten in modern Greek drama and poetry. The...
Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, #22) (Plays and Playwrights)
This volume contains a selection of articles delivered over five years (2005-2009) of an annual seminar hosted by the University of Oxford, and chaired by Matthew Feldmand and Erik Tonning. The book has focussed upon Beckett's formative intellectual development (particularly in the 1930s) and his subsequent influence across several cultural fields ((particularly since the 1950s).
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other tha...
Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015 provides a critical and historical exploration of a tradition of modern dramatic creativity that has received very little scholarly attention. Exploring the emergence of a distinctly modern verse drama at the turn of the century and its development into the twenty-first, it counters common assumptions that the form is a marginal, fundamentally outdated curiosity. Through an examination of the extensive and diverse engagement of literary and theatrical writers, d...
In spite of steady growth in popularity, Pinter's plays have continued to elude adequate critical appraisal. Considering the last decade's scholarship, Austin E. Quigley attributes the impasse in Pinter criticism to the failure of Pinter's readers to appreciate the diversity of ways in which language can transmit information. This explanation places recent commentaries in a new light and enables the author to take a fresh approach to the plays themselves. Originally published in 1975. The Prin...
In Renaissance drama, madness links personal crisis to political crisis. Duncan Salkeld covers a range of psychiatric, political and dramatic literature from the renaissance to the presene day to examine the interplay between madness and drama in the plays of Shakespeare and other key dramatists, such as Jonson, Kyd, Dekker, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher. The cultural history of madness is a fascinating topic and Salkeld uses theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Shoshana Felman and Luce Irigara...
Tragedy: A Student Handbook is a comprehensive introduction to tragedy, designed for advanced level and undergraduate students. It provides clear explanations of key concepts in tragedy and changing ideas about tragedy over time, from classical theories and Renaissance thinking through to modern interpretations. There are short introductions to broad periods and contexts - Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragedy, European playwrights of the late 19th century, modern American tragedy, modern British t...
The Death of Christopher Marlowe
by J Leslie Hotson and G.L. Kittredge